Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c.1683-1867

AUSTRIA, HUNGARY, AND THE HABSBURGS This page intentionally left blank Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs Essays o...

Author: R. J. W. Evans

469 downloads 3626 Views 4MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

AUSTRIA, HUNGARY, AND THE HABSBURGS

This page intentionally left blank

Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs Essays on Central Europe, c.1683–1867 R. J. W. EVANS

AC

AC Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # R. J. W. Evans 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–928144–0

978–0–19–928144–2

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements and Technicalities The origins of this collection are described in the Preface, and the circumstances of the various essays in it are specified at the beginning of each chapter. I am very grateful to the publishers and editors of the books and journals, indicated in each case, for permission to print these revised versions of their texts, as well as to all those who invited me to prepare the other papers. Although every essay is designed to stand alone, I have constructed a single consolidated select Bibliography, so that titles frequently cited will generally be encountered in the notes in an abbreviated form. The variant forms of placenames in Central Europe are a complication irritating to some and endearing to others. The choice of one of them over another can be a partisan statement. I have here sought to use the form or forms appropriate to the then situation; alternative names, including in some cases the present-day official ones, are listed in the Index. The maps, as will be apparent, provide only for a first and basic orientation in a few of the territorial issues discussed: my thanks to Marian Henry Jones for making available the model used in the second of those, which relates to nationalities. I owe a great debt to Teena Stabler, for help with this project and in so many other ways; to members of staff at various librarians, notably the Bodleian (where I should like to single out Carole Menzies) and Cambridge University Library; to Anne Gelling, Ruth Parr and others now or formerly at Oxford University Press; and especially to my family for their support, forbearance and sense of proportion. R. J. W. E. Sunningwell, Oxon. November 2005


Preface The essays in this volume have been written for different occasions over the past twenty years or so. As is indicated in each case, about half of them were published at the time; the others not. All have been revised for the present collection, and that included translating a number of them. In substance, however, they are left as originally conceived, especially those which have already appeared in print in English. It is always hazardous to try to recast a finished piece of scholarship, notwithstanding its faults. Like amateur interference with clockwork mechanisms, the bits all too often resist reassembly. I have described the component parts of the book as essays, rather than as chapters. They do not cohere with one another quite like the stages of argument in a monograph: indeed, they probably should not, if they are to be free to reflect the essential variety and intractability of the historical record. This also allows each to be read separately, as a free-standing item; and I have retained what I hope are productive and helpful elements of internal overlap. Nevertheless, I have sought to indicate the ways in which the different research conclusions may support one another. Moreover, I trust that arrant contradictions, at least, have been avoided. All of the book is about Central Europe; a large part of it pertains to the Habsburg Monarchy. Such terminology is, strictly speaking, rather anachronistic: like much of the historian’s working vocabulary, it would have been little employed by contemporaries. The notion of ‘Central Europe’ raises semantic issues which are addressed in the last essay. ‘Habsburg Monarchy’ can be misleading in a different way. Whereas much of Central Europe stood more or less under Habsburg aegis during the period under examination here, and that rule incorporated an intensity of dynastic involvement increasingly singular in the modern history of the continent, overuse of the word can carry too strong an implication of ‘Habsburg’ agency at all points, exaggerating the scope for governance (good or bad) by one individual or family. Comparable difficulties attach to ‘Austria’, a term which—besides denoting more limited and specific territories—was long, well into the eighteenth century at least, applied to the dynasty itself (the ‘house of Austria’) or to its possessions viewed in a basically patrimonial way.1 Thereby hangs a larger tale. One of the two principal currents of historiography on my subject matter has been broadly centralist: concerned with an Austrian state, with Viennese authority, with metropolitan culture and its 1 For these complexities, see Grete Klingenstein, ‘The Meanings of ‘‘Austria’’ and ‘‘Austrian’’ in the Eighteenth Century’, in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Oresko et al. (Camb., 1997), 423–78.

viii

Preface

dissemination. The other, by contrast, dwells on regions and localities: on Hungary, Tyrol, Lombardy, or wherever, treating these as ultimately selfcontained entities, realms which become coherent above all in the imagination of posterity and as shaped by subsequent (maybe rival) national priorities. As Palacky´ memorably put it, ‘we [in Bohemia] were before Austria, and we shall be after her too’.2 I have tried here to steer a middle course, and map out a third way, interrelating the regional or peripheral perspectives and estimating their impact, collectively as well as severally, upon the centre. That involves investigating the interplay between two kinds of polity. The Habsburg state in statu nascendi during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to rest, as I have tried to expound elsewhere,3 on the three pillars of dynasty, aristocracy, and Catholic church. Over the next hundred years three further buttresses were deployed to sustain the increasingly extended and vulnerable edifice: army, bureaucracy, and managed economy.4 Their construction, together with the attempted adaptation of the former triad, lay at the heart of the famous movement of Josephinism (another designation ex post), the most dynamic and consistent—if not the most theoretically reflective—version of Europe’s enlightened absolutisms.5 By the end of the eighteenth century climax had been followed by nemesis. The work of Maria Theresa and Joseph was always incomplete, and especially so in relation to Hungary: that is a central theme in what follows. Elsewhere too it lost impetus, which was particularly dangerous now that the forces of modernization had been unleashed in the region. This old-new Austrian state took issue with entrenched regional and local systems of jurisdiction and control. On the one hand, that meant the eastern commonwealths, with their corporative structures, their noble dominance, their powerful representative bodies, their contested national traditions, their long-time religious and cultural pluralism, their quasi-feudal landed nexus. In the course of time Bohemia, as we shall see, was largely tamed and redirected; Poland stays marginal for our purposes, at least until the Partitions; the main confrontation—to underline the point—lay with Hungary. On the other hand, 2

See below, p. 98. R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation (Ox., 1979, 1991). An excellent new survey is Thomas Winkelbauer, Sta¨ndefreiheit und Fu¨rstenmacht: La¨nder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter (2 vols., V., 2003). 4 There is a sketch of my argument already in my Introduction to State and Society in Early Modern Austria, ed. C. W. Ingrao (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1994), 1–23. Important recent treatments of these buttresses are respectively Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797 (L., 2003), 78–150, 291–329; Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bu¨rokratie und Beamte in ¨ sterreich,1780 bis 1848 (V., 1991); John Komlo´s, Nutrition and Economic Development in the O Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History (Princeton, 1989). In general, see also P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia, 1740–80 (2 vols., Ox., 1987). 5 Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (L., 2005), is an excellent collection of writings on Josephinism (he prefers to say ‘Josephism’) in its European context. 3

Preface

ix

there was the historic Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, for centuries the continent’s pre-eminent political entity, which spread as a web of myriad linkages through German Central Europe and its contiguous marches, extending in a looser form across the Alps into northern Italy (a dimension that receives all too little attention in what follows here, though others have begun to reassess it6). In some sense—and the issue is addressed in my opening chapter—the Empire remained the prime raison d’eˆtre of Habsburg rulers right up to its demise in 1806. That again, like the crisis of Austrian state building, seems to suggest a caesura at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the end of the Reich accompanied the extinction of independent Poland, the struggle with revolution and the retreat of government-sponsored reform, the onset of a new international order, the emergence of modern national allegiances. Yet it is an important part of my objective to stress continuities in Central Europe across this traditional historiographical divide. The formal creation of ‘Austria-Hungary’ through the so-called Compromise in 1867, a rough terminus for the present collection, was anticipated by outcomes a century and more earlier, and took shape during contests over statehood before as well as after 1800. The stability of the old social order in much of the region did not come under serious threat until 1848. Many of the problems of the old Empire were transferred to the Deutscher Bund, the new Confederation which replaced it; and they were resolved or superseded only decades later, as we shall see. It is crucial not to bracket Austria out of ‘German’ affairs before the 1860s—or even, in some respects, afterwards—just as the Monarchy’s domestic settlement at that juncture came too late to compensate for her long-standing lack of internal cohesion. Essays are, as their name implies, ventures or explorations. Whereas some may have a survey character (and I trust that those in this collection are all reasonably accessible), they cannot do duty for a textbook. Thus while there is much reference in what follows to (say) the extraordinary regime of Emperor Joseph II, or the epic military conflict with French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, or the tumults of 1848–9, the reader must look elsewhere for more introductory narratives of those events—and plenty of good ones are nowadays available.7 6 Notably in the work of Karl Otmar von Aretin: see esp. his Das Alte Reich, 1648–1806 (4 vols., Stuttgart, 1993–2000). 7 For the Habsburg lands pre-1800: Charles W. Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (2nd edn., Camb., 2000); Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence. For post-1800: Helmut Rumpler, Eine Chance fu¨r Mitteleuropa: Bu¨rgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in der Habsburgermonarchie (V., 1997); Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy, c.1765–1918: From Enlightenment to Eclipse (Basingstoke, 2001). For the events of 1848–9 there, see my chapter in The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–9: From Reform to Reaction, ed. Evans and H. Pogge von Strandmann (Ox., 2000), 181–206. For the German Reich and its legacy: Heinz Schilling, Ho¨fe und Allianzen: Deutschland, 1648–1763 (Berlin, 1989); Aretin, Das Alte Reich; Peter C. Hartmann, Kulturgeschichte des Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reiches, 1648 bis 1806: Verfassung, Religion und Kultur (V., 2001); Heinrich Lutz, Zwischen Habsburg und Preussen: Deutschland, 1815–66 (Berlin, 1985); James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Ox., 1989); Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in

x

Preface

I have, however, supplied a brief chronology to make the outlines of the story clearer. I have also affixed short summaries to the start of each chapter, for those who might wish to pick and choose between them in an informed way.

Germany, 1779–1850 (L., 1998). For pre-Partition Poland: Jerzy Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795 (L., 1991). For the diplomatic background in Central and Eastern Europe, see Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Ox., 1994), and two excellent new surveys by H. M. Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–75 (Camb., 2001), and The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740–1815 (Harlow, 2006).

Contents Abbreviations Chronology Maps

xiii xiv xviii

INTRODUCTION 1. The Habsburgs and Central Europe, 1683–1723

3

PART I. ABSOLUTIST ENLIGHTENMENT 2. 3. 4. 5.

Maria Theresa and Hungary The Origins of Enlightenment in the Habsburg Lands Culture and Authority in Central Europe, 1683–1806 The Habsburg Monarchy and Bohemia, 1526–1848

17 36 56 75

P A R T I I . T H E R IS E O F N A T I O N S 6. Nationality in East-Central Europe: Perception and Definition before 1848 7. Frontiers and National Identities in Central-European History 8. Joseph II and Nationality in the Habsburg Lands 9. Religion and Nation in Hungary, 1790–1849

101 114 134 147

PART III. REGIONS AND T HEIR INTERPL AY 10. The Habsburgs and the Hungarian Problem, 1790–1848 11. Empire and Kingdoms: Hungary and Bohemia in the Monarchy, 1741–1871 12. The Transylvanian Saxons: A German Diaspora 13. Hungary and the German Lands in the Nineteenth Century

173 193 209 228

xii

Contents PART IV. THE REVOLUTION AND BEYOND

14. Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy 1840–67: A Study of Perceptions 15. From Confederation to Compromise: The Austrian Experiment, 1849–67 16. Central Europe: The History of An Idea Select Bibliography Index

245 266 293 305 317

Abbreviations AHY ¨G AO Bp. Brat. Buch. Camb. ˇ sCˇH CˇCˇH/C EHR HZ L. ¨ G/MO ¨ IG MIO ¨ StA MO Mun. OL Ox. Pr. SEER Sz. V.

Austrian History Yearbook ¨ sterreichische Geschichte (originally Archiv fu¨r Archiv fu¨r O ¨ Kunde Osterreichischer Geschichtsquellen) Budapest (as place of publication) Bratislava (as place of publication) Bucharest (as place of publication) Cambridge (as place of publication) Cˇesky´ Cˇasopis Historicky´ (between 1953 and 1989 Cˇeskoslovensky´ Cˇasopis Historicky´ ) English Historical Review Historische Zeitschrift London (as place of publication) ¨ sterreichische Geschichtsforschung Mitteilungen des Instituts fu¨r O ¨ sterreichischen (between 1923 and 1942 Mitteilungen des O Instituts fu¨r Geschichtsforschung) ¨ sterreichischen Staatsarchivs Mitteilungen des O Munich (as place of publication) Orsza´gos Leve´lta´r [(Hungarian) National Archives], Budapest Oxford (as place of publication) Prague (as place of publication) Slavonic and East European Review Sza´zadok Vienna (as place of publication)

Central Europe: A Political and Military Chronology, 1683–1867 1526 1618–20 1648 1657–1705 1683 1684–99 1690–1 1688–97 1699 1701–14 1703–11 1705–11 1711–40 1711 1712–23 1714 1717–19 1733–5 1737–9 1740–80 1740–8

1741 1745–65

Ferdinand I becomes king of Bohemia and [parts of ] Hungary Bohemian revolt, defeated at battle of White Mountain Peace of Westphalia Leopold I Holy Roman Emperor Ottomans’ failed siege of Vienna Wars for recovery of Hungary Habsburgs acquire Transylvania; Leopoldine Diploma War of League of Augsburg against France; peace of Rijswijk Peace of Carlowitz/Sremski Karlovci War of Spanish Succession against France; battle of Blenheim/Ho¨chsta¨dt; Eugene’s campaigns in Italy Rebellion of Ferenc II Ra´koćzi in Hungary and Transylvania Joseph I Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI Holy Roman Emperor (Charles III as king of Hungary) Peace of Szatma´r/Satu Mare with Hungarian rebels; exile of Ra´koćzi Pragmatic Sanction, proclaiming indivisibility of Habsburg realms, accepted by diets throughout Monarchy Peace of Rastatt: Habsburgs gain Southern Netherlands (Belgium), Milanese (Lombardy), Naples, Sardinia (exchanged for Sicily, 1720) Further Ottoman war; peace of Passarowitz/Pozˇarevac: Habsburgs gain Banat and parts of Serbia and Wallachia War of Polish Succession; Habsburgs lose Naples, Sicily, and part of Milanese Further Ottoman war; Habsburgs lose Serbian and Wallachian lands Maria Theresa ruler of Monarchy War of Austrian Succession (first two Silesian wars): Austria and Britain versus Prussia, Bavaria, France, Spain, Savoy, etc.; peace of Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle: most of Silesia lost to Prussia Hungarian diet supports Maria Theresa; Bohemian diet supports invading Bavarians Francis I (husband of Maria Theresa) Holy Roman Emperor

Central Europe: A Political and Military Chronology, 1683–1867 1749–60 1756–63 1760s 1765–90 1767 etc. 1772–3 1780–90 1781–2 1781–4 1784–6 1787–91 1789–90 1790–2 1790–1 1791 1792–[1806] 1792–7 1793–5 1799–1801 1804–35 1804–15 1805 1806 1809

xv

Austrian administrative reform, first phase: establishment of Joint (Austro-Bohemian) Chancery and Directorium; Haugwitz as chief minister Seven Years War (third Silesian war): Austria, France, and Russia versus Prussia and Britain; mutual financial prostration Austrian administrative reform, second phase: establishment of State Council (Staatsrat) etc.; Kaunitz as chief minister Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor Urbarium in Hungary; then equivalent decrees elsewhere in Monarchy First Partition of Poland: Habsburgs acquire Galicia; other territories to Russia and Prussia Joseph II ruler of Monarchy Patents of Toleration Patents for ‘Abolition of Serfdom’ Language decree; administrative and legal transformation in Hungary Further Ottoman war; capture of Belgrade Belgian revolt Leopold II Holy Roman Emperor Diet negotiations in Hungary, Bohemia, etc. Peace of Sistova/Svishtov; Ottomans recover Belgrade Francis II Holy Roman Emperor (Francis I as king of Hungary to 1835) First coalition war against (revolutionary) France; peace at Campo Formio and Rastatt; Austria loses Belgium and Lombardy; gains Venice Second and third Partitions of Poland, mainly by Russia and Prussia Second coalition war against (revolutionary-Napoleonic) France; peace at Lune´ville Francis I Emperor of Austria Serbian risings against Ottoman Empire; principality of Serbia under Karageorgevic´ (then Obrenovic´) dynasty Third coalition war against Napoleonic France; battle of Austerlitz/Slavkov; peace of Pressburg/Pozsony; Austria loses Tyrol and Swabian lands (Vorlande) Dissolution of Holy Roman Empire Fourth war against Napoleonic France; battle of Wagram; peace of Scho¨nbrunn; Austria loses Galicia and Adriatic provinces (‘Kingdom of Illyria’)

xvi

Central Europe: A Political and Military Chronology, 1683–1867

1813–14 1814–15 1815–22 1819 1821 1830–48 1833 1835–48 1846 1847 Nov. 1848 Mar

Apr. May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Dec. 1848–1916 1849 Mar. Apr. June

Fifth coalition war against Napoleonic France; battle of Leipzig; peace of Paris Congress of Vienna; German Confederation (Bund ) established; recovery/extension of Austrian lands in Italy Congress system: congresses of Aachen, Troppau/Opava–Laibach/Ljubljana, Verona Karlsbad decrees Clemens Metternich becomes State Chancellor (Hof- und Staatskanzler) Reform Age in Hungary (Istvań Szećhenyi, Lajos Kossuth, etc.) Mu¨nchengra¨tz agreement (Austria, Prussia, Russia) Ferdinand I Emperor of Austria (Ferdinand V as king of Hungary); government by Regency Council (Staatskonferenz); the Vorma¨rz (‘pre-March’) years Peasant revolt in Galicia Hungarian diet opened at Pressburg/Pozsony/Bratislava Revolutions in Vienna, Pressburg, Pest, Prague, Milan, Venice; fall of Metternich; convocation of Austrian constituent assembly (Reichstag); war in Italy; Pre-Parliament (Vorparlament) at Frankfurt April Laws in Hungary; Palacky´’s letter of refusal to Frankfurt Renewed insurrection in Vienna; dynasty flees to Innsbruck; German national assembly meets at Frankfurt Slav Congress in Prague; disturbances quelled by Windischgra¨tz; provisional government set up at Frankfurt Hungarian national assembly meets in Pest; Reichstag assembles in Vienna; Radetzky wins battle of Custozza Dynasty returns to Vienna Jellacˇic´ invades Hungary; Frankfurt Assembly votes for kleindeutsch constitution, without Austria (unless in personal union with Hungary) Revolution in Vienna, quelled by Windischgra¨tz; dynasty flees to Olmu¨tz/Olomouc, Reichstag to Kremsier/Kromeˇˇr´ızˇ Abdication of Ferdinand; Schwarzenberg regime; Windischgra¨tz invades Hungary; Committee of National Defence there under Kossuth Francis Joseph Emperor of Austria Dictated (oktroyiert) constitution in Austria; Reichstag dissolved; Frankfurt Assembly offers crown to king of Prussia Habsburgs deposed as rulers of Hungary; Prussian king rejects German crown Russian armies invade Hungary

Central Europe: A Political and Military Chronology, 1683–1867 Aug. 1850 1851 1855 1859 1860 Apr. Oct. 1861 Feb. May 1865 1866 1867 Feb. 1867–1916 1867 Dec. 1870 1871 1877–8 1879 1897 1905–6 1908 1914 June Aug. 1918 Oct.

xvii

Final defeat of Hungarian armies and capitulation by Go¨rgey; fall of Venetian Republic Reconstitution of German Confederation; Convention of Olmu¨tz; Prussia abandons plans for a German union without Austria Silvester Patents in Austria: absolutism restored; Bach regime Concordat between Austria and Papacy War in Italy: battles of Magenta and Solferino; Austria loses Lombardy Reichsrat (Imperial Council) expanded ‘October’ Diploma: federal constitutionalism ‘February’ Patent: centralized constitutionalism; Schmerling regime Hungarian diet convened (prorogued Aug.) Schmerling dismissed; Belcredi installed; Hungarian diet reconvened Austro-Prussian war: battle of Ko¨niggra¨tz/Sadowa; loss of Venetia Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich/kiegyeze´s) initialled (enacted May; coronation June) Francis Joseph king of Hungary ‘December Constitution’ in Austria Franco-Prussian war ‘Hohenwart experiment’: abortive constitutional negotiations with Czechs Balkan war; Congress of Berlin; Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina; establishment of Serbian and Rumanian kingdoms Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany Badeni ordinances: constitutional crisis in Austria Constitutional crisis in Austria-Hungary Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina Assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to throne, at Sarajevo Outbreak of the First World War Dissolution of Habsburg Monarchy

CENTRAL EUROPE c. 1683 E. PRUSSIA

Central European lands of the Habsburgs Losses 1550–1648 (with dates) Gains 1683–1718 (with dates) The Habsburg Monarchy in 1718 (Naples and Sardinia (1714) omitted)

Danzig

Lübeck

Vis

tula

Weser

UN

IT ED

Amsterdam

PR O

VI N

CE S

Hamburg Bremen MECKLENBURG BRANDENBURG BRUNSW ICK Osnabrück Berlin Rhin e Magdeburg Münster Wittenberg LUSATIA WESTPHALIA (to Saxony

Warsaw

N.B. Frontiers in S.W.Germany were too intricate, those in Hungary (until 1699) too fluctuating, to be precisely represented

be

El

POLAND Boundary of the Holy Roman Empire after 1648 SO UT 1620–35) Brussels HE Cologne Leipzig RN Görlitz NE S Breslau TH SAXONY Dresden IL (1714 ERLA ES (Duchies) (Electorate) ) ND IA Frankfurt a.M. S Würzburg Mainz Trier Cracow Prague IA Brünn Dn N Sein Paris O PALATINATE ies e NC Nuremberg BO H E MIA ter Heidelberg FRA MOR AV IA Regensburg D SWABIA an ub Ingolstadt FRANCE Linz e Vienna a BAVARIA Pressburg sz Pr Ti Szatmár ut AU STR IA PARTS OF Munich h Salzburg IN ALSACE HU H U NG N GAR A RY Y H ER E (to France 1648) MOLDAVIA Buda Bude D IT N e Kolozsvár Kolozsvar SWISS ED LA Rhin (1684–89) (1884–89) LANDS (E R B TR TRA AN N SYLV SY LV AN IA Drav CONFEDERATION a Gyulafahervar Gyulafehérvár (1690) (1890) Kronstadt Kronsladt Geneva Trent Zagreb Milah Milan Hermannstadt (1718) P0 Venice (1714) TIA OA Sava Karlowitz WALLACHIA SAVOY CR Rhon e

Belgrade

Florence TUSCANY

Graz

OT

(1718) TO

MA

N

Ragusa

EMP

IRE

e

nub

Da

Maps

)

Oder

Genoa

RUSSIA

GERMANY

Elbe Prague BOHEMIA

SILE

SIA

GA

Cracow Acquired (1846)

LIC

IA

MORAVIA e

LOWER AUSTRIA Vienna

Th

eis

s

INA

UPPER AUSTRIA

OV

Inn

K BU

nub

Do

SWITZERLAND

LOMBARDM LOMBARDY (lost 1859)

SALZBURG TYROL

Danufe

Budapest

VORARLBSRO VORARLBERG

STYRIA

CARINTHIA CA

VENETIA (lost 1866)

RN IO LA

va

BOSNIA

D L T

C

SE

A

G

A

R

Y

Maros

BANAT

SERBIA

THE NATIONALITIES OF THE HABSBURG MONARCHY, c. 1867

Approximate ethnic boundaries Provincial boundaries HERZEGOVINA Borders of the Monarchy Borders of the Crown of St. Stephen 0 50 100 miles

IA

TI

A

Y

IA

M

AL

D

A

A

IT

R

N

TRANSYLVANIA

CROATIA-SLAVONIA

Fiume

ISTRIA

U

Dr av a

Sa

Trieste

H

0

Germans

Slovenians

Magyars

Italians

Czechs

Rumanians

Slovaks

Poles

Croatians

Ruthenes

50 100 150 kilometres

Serbs


INTRODUCTION


1 The Habsburgs and Central Europe, 1683–1723 A short introductory essay which presents the successive Austrian and Hungarian attempts to consolidate the Habsburgs’ possessions after their vast enlargement at the expense of the Turks during the two decades after the siege of Vienna, and then asks why so little was achieved. The explanation for this is sought in the absence of an adequate ideology of rule: the dynasty was still wedded to imperial aspirations and associated schemes for Counter-Reformation. The Reich (whose territories included the AustroBohemian, but not the Hungarian lands) remained a mixed blessing for Habsburg government in and beyond this period. But it represented a tradition and a status which could not be ignored.

The first years of the eighteenth century, in wars across the continent from Spain to the Baltic, the Netherlands to the Black Sea, saw a transformation in the political balance in Europe, perhaps the first ‘European’ balance at all. This supplanted a system of 200 years’ standing, which had hinged on FrancoHabsburg rivalry, and it shaped power relations for the next 200 years. It rested on the emergence as full international players of Great Britain, the AngloScottish union, in the west, and of Muscovy, the Russian tsardom, in the east, with the new Prussian kingdom in the centre. Although the Bourbons gained the Spanish crown, France was diminished by the outcome of the wars. Her struggle to recover former dominance proved an important cause of the great Revolution, which issued in further debilitation after the hectic Napoleonic phase of triumphant but (self-)destructive overcompensation. The Habsburg dynasty constituted the other pole of the previous dualism. Its role decisively changed too, with the extinction of the Spanish line and the emergence of a free-standing Austrian base; yet there were problems, even contradictions, about its metamorphosis. In forty years the Habsburgs extended a kind of hegemony over Central Europe in a manner unprecedented before or after. From 1683 the relief of Vienna led to a series of triumphant campaigns from the very walls of the capital to march deep into the Balkans; it brought the acquisition of huge tracts of Hungary, Transylvania, even parts of Serbia and Unpublished; first drafted 2003, for a workshop at New College, Oxford.

4

Introduction

Rumania. At the same time Austria gained further territories in the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Naples, and Lombardy, and the Southern Netherlands, alongside a robust (re)assertion of mastery in Germany. Finally, in 1723, the Pragmatic Sanction, the legal guarantee of undivided inheritance for the Habsburg family through the female line, the foundation document of the modern Monarchy, was acknowledged after much negotiation by its most dangerous potential domestic adversary, the Hungarian estates.1 However, at the chronological mid-point of this ascendence, debilitating weakness within the heart of the new body politic became apparent. In 1703 Prince Ferenc II Ra´koćzi renewed the Hungarian tradition of anti-Habsburg revolt under semi-sovereign aegis. His grandfather and great-grandfather, as princes of the Transylvanian state, had both been challengers to the Habsburgs; his mother, daughter of one rebel and wife of another, died in the February of that very year. His movement gained substance because it coincided with another rich local custom, of armed popular discontent, led now by Tama´s Esze and other peasant militants just deserting from the Austrian army on its march to confront the French and their allies in Germany. Within three months the dissident camps joined together in the largest insurrection the Habsburgs faced between the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and the revolutions of 1848. The rebellion lasted eight years; for a time Ra´koćzi controlled most of Hungary, as well as reclaiming family rule over Transylvania. In the end the two exhausted sides reached a settlement at Szatma´r which involved the repudiation of Ra´koćzi himself and salvaged much of the Habsburg position, while leaving Hungarian separatism largely intact.2 Give or take the Ra´koćzi affair, the balance sheet on the surface and on the map still looked overwhelmingly positive for the dynasty after those forty years: the baroque magnificence of rebuilt Vienna, a string of grandiose monasteries and an abundance of aristocratic and royal palaces seemed (and still seem) to bear witness to it. Yet within another two decades the young beneficiary of the Pragmatic Sanction, Maria Theresa, faced that desperate plight which is famous in eighteenth-century history and will form the starting point for the next chapter in this book. Already defeats of the 1730s in Italy and the Balkans, then 1 The standard account of these events remains Oswald Redlich, Weltmacht des Barock: ¨ sterreich in der Zeit Kaiser Leopolds I. (4th edn.,V., 1961); id., Das Werden einer Großmacht: O ¨ sterreich von 1700 bis 1740 (Baden bei Wien, 1938). Good new outlines in Peter H. Wilson, O German Armies: War and German Politics, 1648–1806 (L., 1998), 68–129, and Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 151 ff. The chief historian of the antecedents and genesis of the Pragmatic Sanction remains Gustav Turba, Geschichte des Thronfolgerechtes in allen habsburgischen La¨ndern bis zur Pragmatischen Sanktion Kaiser Karls VI., 1156 bis 1732 (V., 1903), and id., Die Grundlagen der Pragmatischen Sanktion (2 vols., V., 1911–12), though his Austrophile account needs to be treated with caution. 2 General coverage in Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete, 1686–1790, ed. Gy. Ember and G. Heckenast (2 vols., Bp., 1989), with full bibliog.; A´gnes Va´rkonyi, Ke´t pogańy ko¨zt: a Ra´koćzi-szabadsa´gharc to¨rteńete (2nd edn., Bp., 1972). Cf. Charles W. Ingrao, In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1979).

The Habsburgs and Central Europe

5

invasion and territorial concessions of the 1740s suggested that Austria’s underlying response to the opportunities of previous decades had been inadequate. Only thereafter was real transformation taken in hand: an explicit reckoning with many of the existing values and institutions of Habsburg Central Europe. We must ask why internal reconstruction was so out of phase with military victory and territorial expansion. Much has always been made of the problems of female succession and the vicissitudes of the Pragmatic Sanction as an international document devised to secure the integrity of the Habsburg lands. But these were symptoms rather than causes. And the root causes lie closer to that Ra´koćzi imbroglio which commenced in 1703 than has commonly been realized.

In retrospect, at least, it must be clear that the incorporation of the vast lands of the Hungarian crown formed the key issue for the future of the Habsburgs as rulers of increasingly Danubian-centred domains with an increasingly crucial Balkan dimension. What programmes or conceptions underlay that incorporation? I shall outline two phases, corresponding to the two sub-periods we have already identified. The first plans, in the years before 1703, were squarely Austrian ones. At their heart stood proposals contained in the so-called Einrichtungswerk, a thorough blueprint for the newly conquered realm. They would have obliterated existing constitutional structures, looking to promote legal, peasant, economic, and fiscal reform without regard to local traditions or concerns. The Einrichtungswerk was masterminded by Cardinal Kollonich, a merely nominal Hungarian who embodied broader Catholic and imperial interests. Even so, aulic advisers like Kinsky—representing a Bohemian viewpoint which we shall encounter again in the pages which follow—thought it not harsh enough.3 Closely associated with this vision were two Italians in service of the dynasty: Count Luigi Marsigli, surveyor and map-maker extraordinary; and a friar called Angelo Gabriele, an expert in pyrotechnics, who compiled his own scheme for a thoroughly subordinated Hungary. Early cameralist ideas also made their mark, especially the writings of Ho¨rnigk which explicitly included provisions for Hungary.4 There were specific designs for the ‘Neo-Acquistica’, the lands ‘newly acquired’ from Turkish hands; as well as for colonization of the puszta, the 3 Theodor Mayer, Verwaltungsreform in Ungarn nach der Tu ¨ rkenzeit (2nd edn., Sigmaringen, 1980), esp. text at 97–135; Jańos J. Varga, ‘Berendeze´si tervek a to¨ro¨k kiu˝ze´seńek az ido˝szaka´ban: az Einrichtungswerk’, Sz. 125 (1991), 449–86, 500–16; and cf. id. in Hı´d a sza´zadok felett, ed. P. Hana´k and M. Nagy (Pećs, 1997), 137–50, and in Leve´lta´ri Szemle, 42 (1992), no. 2, 3–17. 4 Raffaella Gherardi, Potere e costituzione a Vienna fra Sei e Settecento: il ‘buon ordine’ di Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (Bologna, 1980); John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven, 1994), esp. 65 ff. On Gabriele, most recently, Antal Szańtay in Ambivalenzen der Aufkla¨rung: Festschrift fu¨r Ernst Wangermann, ed. ¨ sterreich u¨ber alles, G. Ammerer and H. Haas (V., 1997), 75–92. Philipp Wilhelm von Ho¨rnigk, O wenn es nur will, ed. G. Otruba (V., 1964).

6

Introduction

plainlands ‘laid waste’—in the event rather by the depredations of recent armies (on both sides) than by long-standing neglect. Extension of the Military Frontier (Grenze) region and more soldier-colonists there likewise featured on the agenda. So did enhanced royal exploitation of the mines, especially salt, a state preserve. The regime in Vienna looked to much higher taxation: in Transylvania fiscal exactions actually rose tenfold. That was to include the nobility, with a land terrier decreed to be drawn up from April 1703.5 Most of this was swept away by the belligerence which set in that month—not least since the whole Ra´koćzi turmoil had been substantially provoked by all the new monopolies, impositions, and unconstitutional actions. The Cameralists were largely forgotten; the copper trade ruined.6 Some initiatives were revived by the government at the end of the war, notably a regeneration of the Banat of Temesva´r under the picturesquely named general, Count Claudius Florimond Mercy—although even that would largely be lost in the turmoils of the 1730s. Further economic efforts began after the settlement at Passarowitz, with a new official trading company for the Balkans, the ‘kaiserliche privilegierte Orientalische Kompagnie’. But it too only lasted a decade or so; and crossborder commerce tended to fall into the hands of ‘Greeks’, as merchants from across the new Balkan border were generically called.7 In fact the second wave of planning, post-1703, came mainly not from the Austrian, but from the Hungarian side. Earlier efforts by Hungarian representatives had been snubbed: loyal nobles had drawn up their own Einrichtungswerk.8 But Ra´koćzi’s own incisive domestic policies seemed to show there was scope for change, if sensitively handled; and after the peace of Szatma´r estates’ traditions reasserted themselves, through the regular procedures of dietal tractatus with the royal executive authority. Long-drawn-out negotiations from 1712 to 1715 secured agreement especially to establish a common Habsburg army, while the estates continued to regulate the main general tax levy (contributio) and to oversee local militias (insurrectio). Then further protracted discussions at committee level issued in a high-sounding Systema PoliticoEconomico-Militare which was tabled at the 1722–3 diet.9 5 Varga, ‘Berendeze ´si tervek’. For Transylvania: Zsolt Troćsańyi, Habsburg-politika és Habsburgkormańyzat Erde´lyben, 1690–1740 (Bp., 1988), 194–304. Much information on Austrian administrative planning in the op. posth. (written in the 1950s) of William B. Slottman, Ferenc II Ra´koćzi and the Great Powers (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 205–78, and id., Coordinating Committee: An Austrian Delegation Looks at War, Taxes and Reform, 1697–1703 (Boulder, Colo., 1999). 6 Heinrich von Srbik, Der staatliche Exporthandel O ¨ sterreichs von Leopold I bis Maria Theresia (L., 1907). 7 Jeno˝ Szentkla ´ray, Mercy . . . kormańyzata a temesi bańsa´gban (Bp., 1909). Ferenc Eckhart, in Sz. 52 (1918), 356–91; Traian Stoianovich, ‘The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant’, Journal of Economic History, 20 (1960), 234–313; Emanuel Turczynski, Konfession und Nation: Zur Fru¨hgeschichte der serbischen und ruma¨nischen Nationsbildung (Du¨sseldorf, 1976), 21 ff.; Edit Petri, 8 Varga, ‘Berendeze ´si tervek’, esp. 500–16. in Sz., 130 (1996), 69–104. 9 Henrik Marczali, Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete III. Ka´rolyto´l a bećsi congressusig, 1711–1815 (Bp., 1898), 9–232, is still unsurpassed as a general narrative of Charles VI’s reign. There is a splendid


7

These Hungarian ventures bore somewhat better fruit than had the Austrian ones. They yielded a new Lieutenancy Council (more on these institutions in the next chapter) as their main achievement; alongside some reform of law courts, with an expanded Septemviral Table at the top and fresh regional sessions. Some remodelling of the Hungarian Chamber took place. In Transylvania the local unicameral diet, though a more manipulable vehicle for the regime, could use its frequent meetings to make proposals about peasant burdens, economic incentives, and the like.10 However, Hungarian and Austrian endeavours shared the same decisive weakness: neither was simultaneously coordinated by both parties. Besides, they mostly became enmeshed by the later 1720s in the aggravated immobility of Charles VI’s policies as a whole. In order to understand why that was so, we must now turn to two more fundamental obstacles to consolidation, obstacles rooted in the political culture of the day rather than in politics as such.

The first of these was Counter-Reformation. The prime doctrine of rule for seventeenth-century Habsburgs had surely been vindicated—in the minds of many contemporaries—by their triumphs since 1683, particularly the antiIslamic ones. The sermons of Marco d’Aviano and Abraham a Sancta Clara, to cite only the most celebrated Viennese preachers of the day, leave no doubt about that. With their large Protestant and Orthodox populations, the new Habsburg territories looked ripe—perhaps foreordained—for the Roman Catholic message, precisely because of the sinful state which had long left them under Turkish control. Moreover, this was not just a campaign generated from outside the lands of St Stephen. It rested too on ensconced Catholic positions at home which the Viennese authorities had nursed over preceding decades. At times the local church establishment in Hungary pressed harder than the Habsburgs themselves. It moved to full wrecking tactics in the early 1720s, when the government, concerned to have the Pragmatic Sanction accepted, relaxed its pressure on religious opponents. A typical text of that date is entitled ‘theological opuscule, in which it is enquired whether and how far a prince, magistrate or Catholic lord may . . . compel heretics to the Catholic faith’. No more doubt was entertained about the answer than had been fifty years earlier in Bishop Ba´rsony’s notorious hardline pamphlet, Veritas toti mundo declarata.11 Yet, now as then, new treatment of the eighteenth-century Hungarian diet and all its workings in Istvań Szija´rto´, A die´ta: a magyar rendek és az orsza´ggyu˝le´s, 1708–92 (Bp., 2005). 10 Ember in Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete, 1686–1790, i. 391–499; Troćsańyi, Habsburg-politika, 305–83. 11 Anon., Opusculum theologicum in quo quaeritur an et qualiter possit princeps, magistratus, Dominus Catholicus . . . haereticos . . . ad fidem catholicam amplectendam cogere (Nagyszombat, 1721). Cf. Marczali, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete, 120. Much on this in the Habilitationsschrift by ¨ sterreichische Monarchie. Von einer Partnerschaft Joachim Bahlcke, Ungarischer Episkopat und O zur Konfrontation, 1686–1790 (Stuttgart, 2005), and cf. id. on Bishop Ma´rton Padańyi Bı´ro´ in

8

Introduction

Catholic campaigners drew encouragement and inspiration from the dynasty’s own discriminatory activities. Protestants’ worship was restricted to a limited number of loci articulati; their organizations were closely regulated, their grievances withheld from the diet. Altogether they found themselves by this time largely extruded from public life. In Transylvania, the only territory under Habsburg rule where Catholics formed a minority, such an outcome was not (yet) possible. There the Roman Church needed to be largely refounded, both as a hierarchy and on the ground, but in conditions of existing toleration which had earlier helped to sustain the remnant of Catholics as well. Some spiritual and institutional renewal took place, especially under Jesuit aegis; so did some high-profile episodes of material recovery, above all of the monumental church building in the centre of Kolozsva´r, claimed from the Unitarians in 1717. But the main weapon in Catholic hands was the choice of officials: almost all administrators in the Transylvanian Chancellery in Vienna and an absolute majority on the Gubernium at home were Catholics by the 1730s.12 In both Hungary and Transylvania this belated but virulent CounterReformation included an assault on Orthodox Christians, particularly through the rival Uniate churches which, following some earlier initiatives and imitating developments in Poland, were set up around 1700 among Ruthenes and Rumanians. In neither case did the promised benefits for their priests amount to much, except in respect of a tiny educated elite brought up in Jesuit colleges and then sent for studies in Rome. Advantage for the Uniate flocks was even harder to see, not least since local Catholics often (as in Poland) frustrated attempts to integrate them. One partial exception were the Serbs who, reinforced by ˇ rnojevic´, gained real prominent emigration from the Balkans under Patriarch C ecclesiastical privileges—even quasi-political ones—from 1690 on. Besides the military priorities of the day, the Habsburg authorities may have expected future success here through more gentle pressures. Indeed, the existing small Uniate foundation among the Serbs soon gained renewed official sponsorship, and tensions resumed. By the 1740s Orthodox resentments brought a threatening intensification of Russian influence.13 What can be the explanation for such confidence in the Catholic mission, in such circumstances? It was not a Roman dictate; in fact, during the 1700s AHY, 31 (2000), 15–32. For Ba´rsony, and in general for the later seventeenth-century starting point, cf. R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation (3rd edn., Oxford, 1991), 247–57, and further reflections in id., ‘Die Grenzen der Konfessionalisierung: Die Folgen der Gegenreformation fu¨r die Habsburgerla¨nder, c.1650–1781’, in Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa: Wirkungen des religio¨sen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur, ed. J. Bahlcke and A. Strohmeyer (Stuttgart, 1999), 395–412. 12 Tro ´ csańyi, Habsburg-politika, 315–27. 13 Johann H. Schwicker, Politische Geschichte der Serban in Ungarn (Bp., 1880); Turczynski, Konfession und Nation; Doko Slijepcˇevic´, Istorija Srpske pravoslavne crkve (3 vols., Mun., 1962–86), i.


9

Austrian rulers engaged themselves for a time on a collision course with the papacy, which had already condemned their sequestration of ecclesiastical resources for the war effort. Moreover, there were some signs of a protoJansenist tendency, notably strong under Joseph I (ironically his adversary Ra´koćzi shared it too) and the free-thinkers round Prince Eugene.14 Rather, this Counter-Reformation grew out of dynastic pretensions, as embodied in the Pietas Austriaca conspicuous in the (self-)image of crown and Habsburg family, which reached its climax with Charles VI’s grandiose aborted vision for his own Escorial at Klosterneuburg outside Vienna. Yet on the whole it is the modest dimensions of the cult of the dynasty itself at that time which must surely strike us. Consider especially its discreet architectural self-representation in the Hofburg, even after the early eighteenth-century rebuild, so much less obtrusive than settings for the aristocracy, or even the church.15 Ultimately the Austrian Counter-Reformation, as an assertion of public doctrine, rested on an underlying ideological engagement of which anti-Ottoman and Catholic rhetoric were merely partial manifestations.

This larger commitment was to the imperial idea. It would take us much too far to review here the classical and medieval notions of universal rule which attached to the Reich in its earlier centuries.16 Some were contemporary; others elaborated in retrospect (I shall return in the last essay to the issue of changing perceptions of the Central-European space). But they formed the essential element in continuing assertions by successive emperors to unique and superior sovereignty, at least in Europe; and they could on occasion be regenerated by effective monarchs, as had occurred most recently under Maximilian I and especially Charles V. With the latter’s abdication and the new religious and political schism of the sixteenth century, this wider vision of empire, although it retained a strong intellectual and artistic hold, came to seem discredited. The Thirty Years War introduced a further phase in its debasement. Under intensifying pressure from other European rulers, emperors were forced into protracted disputes, above all with France, just to maintain the protocol of their dignity. For the same reason they long sought to refuse parity—or the cherished epithet of ‘majesty’—to Russian tsars, who laid

Cf. below, p. 38. Maria Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text (Mainz, 2000), 191–211; Rouven Pons, ‘Wo der gekro¨nte Lo¨we hat seinen Kayser-Sitz’: Herrschaftsrepra¨sentation am Wiener Kaiserhof zur Zeit Leopolds I. (Egelsbach, 2001). Franz Matsche, Die Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee Kaiser Karls VI. Ikonographie, Ikonologie und Programmatik des ‘Kaiserstils’ (2 vols., Berlin, 1981); Hellmut Lorenz in State and Society in Early Modern Austria, ed. C.W. Ingrao (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1994), 93–109. 16 An essential introduction is Richard Koebner, Empire (Cambridge, 1961). See also James Muldoon, Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 (Basingstoke, 1999). 14 15

10

Introduction

claim to the same heritage through a side route. By the time Peter I chose to style himself imperator, that concession had effectively been made.17 Meanwhile, however, a strong recovery of ground for the imperial cause took place, at least within the German lands themselves, by 1683. That went with the Habsburgs’ fairly scrupulous maintenance of the terms of the Westphalian settlement, which proved to have consolidated the institutions of the Reich to surprisingly good effect, the more so as French ambitions in the region unleashed a reaction in their favour. Leopold I’s shrewd Reichspolitik culminated in the internal alliance system which he was able to build during the wars of the 1680s and 1690s. Even Brandenburg was a kind of partner from the death of Elector Frederick William onwards, though recognition of their kingship in Prussia was necessary to cement the Hohenzollerns’ allegiance. The grant of electoral dignity to Hanover in 1692 belonged in the same scheme of productive concessions within the established order. When it was confirmed in 1708, the Habsburgs even managed, in return, to recover their kingdom of Bohemia’s long-lost place among the curia of electors.18 The political campaign was both reflected and promulgated in the aesthetic sphere: associated with showy and sumptuous art and architecture which evidently carried some kind of message. In the 1930s and early 1940s the first serious iconographic student of this phenomenon, Hans Sedlmayr, saw it as an ‘imperial style’, a Reichsstil, manifest for instance in the elaborate visual statement made by Hildebrandt and the younger Fischer von Erlach’s Chancellery building in the Hofburg. Serious preconceptions in the pan-German climate of the Third and Nazified Reich disfigured Sedlmayr’s approach; and forty years later Franz Matsche reacted against it, identifying rather a ‘ ‘‘Kaiserstil’’ in the service of the state idea of Charles VI’: i.e. a programme which was conceived universally, not restricted to the (German) Reich, and which represented a separate Habsburg Kaisertum based on the Austrian hereditary lands.19 Matsche’s is an intricate and impressive analysis. But he misses the point that such an ideology could still only embody those within the Reich and capitalize on the Reich’s own traditions. An ‘Austrian Empire’, that phrase so often injudiciously and anachronistically employed to describe the (early) eighteenth-century 17 Isabel de Madariaga in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Oresko et al. (Cambridge, 1997), 351–81. This issue is neglected in the superb study by Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals (L., 2000). 18 The latest treatment of the revived synergies between Kaiser, Reich, and German nation is by Martin Wrede in HZ, 280 (2005), 83–115. See also Karl Otmar von Aretin, Das alte Reich, 1648–1806, vol. ii: Kaisertradition und o¨sterreichische Großmachtpolitik, 1684–1745 (Stuttgart, ¨ sterreich, 1648–1740 (Mu¨nster, 1999). For Bohemia, cf. 1997); Harm Klueting, Das Reich und O below, p. 90. 19 Hans Sedlmayr, Epochen und Werke: Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte (2 vols., V., 1959–60), ii, esp. 140–56 (orig. 1938); cf. Friedrich Polleroß, in Fischer von Erlach und die Wiener Barocktradition, ed. Polleroß (V., 1995), 9–56. Matsche, Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee, esp. Vorwort i., p. xi (the Kaiserstil was ‘ein von Grund auf ideologisch gepra¨gter ikonographischer Stil’), and i. 1 f.


11

Habsburg realms, in fact indicates exactly what the Habsburg lands were not. Thus Leopold, as conqueror of the Turks, could be placed in suitable classical context, as in the decor at the castle of Troja outside Prague. Here conventional dynastic-conservative imagery was matched by a new military and personalized view of Leopold as emperor. In the same way his son Charles VI might have himself depicted as a new Charles V, or assume the guise of an ancient Roman ruler.20 By the same token, there is a grain of truth in the older argumentation in favour of a Reichsstil. Some heightened patriotism was evident, as in the 1690s among advisers to the future Joseph I, particularly his tutor Hans Jacob Wagner von Wagenfels, author of the Ehren-Ruff Teutschlands of 1692, and his majordomo Salm.21 In other words, imperial claims were now by necessity increasingly in some sense German ones. Hungary, however, lay beyond the pale (and perhaps the original Irish resonance of that phrase is here appropriate). The legacy of the 1670s, witness to the toughest assault yet on the country’s native institutions by a repressive Austrian military and civilian regime, was only papered over with a series of compromises before the Ottoman march on Vienna which, as is hardly surprising, enjoyed much Hungarian support. Then came the savage impositions of Habsburg generals during the war years, notably the bloodthirsty Antonio Carafa. Hungary’s rebel leaders indeed counted as hardly different from Turks in the iconography of the time; while even loyalists were largely excluded from all Austrian counsels, especially the innermost ones, including negotiations for the various peace settlements with the Porte. Ironically that applied to Ferenc Ra´koćzi too, an effective prisoner of the Habsburgs throughout his youth: he was raised to the rank of Reichsfu¨rst, given a Vienna base, Bohemian education, German dress and wife; he had little contact with Magyars or their language; he even sought to be set up as a landowner outside Hungary. But Ra´koćzi was never fully accepted or trusted by the Austrians. His subsequent revolt was as much a matter of frustrated assimilation as of the summons to a national cause.22 A notorious passage from the text of the Einrichtungswerk calls for ‘the kingdom [of Hungary] to be gradually Germanized, so that the Hungarian disposition to revolutions and unrest may be tempered with the German and thereby brought to abiding fealty and affection for their natural hereditary monarch’.23 20 Goloubeva, Glorification of Emperor Leopold I, 123 ff.; Pons, Herrschaftsrepra ¨ sentation; Jutta Schumann, Die andere Sonne: Kaiserbild und Medienstrategie im Zeitalter Leopolds I. (Berlin, 2003). Cf. Ge´za Galavics, Ko¨ssunk kardot az pogańy ellen: to¨ro¨k ha´boru´k és ke´pzo˝mu˝ve´szet (Bp., 1986), 103– 32; Matsche, Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee, i. 242 ff., 291–332. 21 Cf. below, p.58. 22 La ´szlo´ Szo¨reńyi, in Ra´koćzi-tanulmańyok, ed. B. Ko¨peczi et al. (Bp., 1980), 291–315. 23 ‘das Ko ¨ nigreich . . . nach und nach germanisiret, das Hungarische zu Revolutionen und Unruhen geneigte Geblu¨t mit dem teutschen temperiret und mithin zur besta¨ndigen Treu und Lieb ihres natu¨rlichen Erbko¨nigs . . . aufgerichtet werden mo¨chte’: qu. Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete, 1686– 1790, i.27, 94; cf. Varga, ‘Berendeze´si tervek’, 478 ff.

12

Introduction

We should take care not to over-interpret these words, as has too often been done, particularly with a view to the future. But for the present they definitely meant something. The attitude was shared by Marsigli: ‘The Hungarian nation is in everything opposed to the German and by nature inconstant and novelty-seeking, captious and haughty, as those nations are inclined to be which claim to be free.’ So, he advises, bring in Germans, especially soldiers, to rein in the ‘mutable brains’ of the Hungarian population; ‘nor should Your Majesty be surprised at my rigorous way of proceeding, since these barbarians submit with the most arrogant and conceited courtesies.’24 It is conveniently overlooked by posterity that the philosopher Giambattista Vico’s oeuvre includes a servile panegyric to the sadistic Count Carafa.25 Habsburg advisers did not quite recommend abolishing Hungary. It could not be incorporated unilaterally into the Reich anyway; and they needed its crown for claims to title in the Balkans and along the Adriatic.26 But they sought to keep it weak and divided. Croatia and Transylvania were held separate, basically for military purposes: key roles fell to the appointed ban (viceroy) in Zagreb and the army commander in Hermannstadt. The Croats made their own constitutional point in 1712, by initiating a loyal petition for implementation of the Pragmatic Sanction (though they also associated themselves statutorily with the eventual Hungarian approval for it ten years on). The Transylvanians had extracted diplomas from Leopold to protect their existing structures of governance; but Charles VI later claimed the right of—threefold—conquest of the province, and the Pragmatic Sanction had to be enacted there by royal putsch.27 It is only natural that such measures confirmed restorative, almost atavistic responses on the part of the Hungarian estates.

What, then, were the prospects for a Habsburg state, a self-sufficient ‘Austria’, to match the other core polities which made up the new European power order? I shall have more to say about that in the essays which follow, but a preliminary conclusion would suggest that the decades around 1700 were a real opportunity missed. We may recall that Austrian triumphs in and after 1683 had only resulted from an accident—or rather from the undesired consequence, in the shape of imprudent Turkish aggression, of failed Habsburg policies in Hungary earlier. The first draft of the future Pragmatic Sanction, actually hatched in 1703, was likewise an ad hoc response to international threat: a pactum mutuae successionis within the family, with each branch to inherit from the other, through a female if necessary. Gherardi, Potere e costituzione, 199, 335. De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphaei libri quatuor (Naples, 1716). 26 Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete, 1686–1790, i. 84. 27 Croats: Turba, Grundlagen, i; Transylvania: B. Ko ¨ peczi et al. (ed.) Erde´ly to¨rteńete (3 vols., Bp., 1986), ii. 973. 24 25


13

Under Joseph, and for a few years under Charles, certain initiatives look more ¨ sterreichische Hofkanzlei) took over most coherent. The Austrian Chancellery (O diplomatic correspondence, and was divided up into two main departments, anticipating the creation of a separate foreign ministry (Hof- und Staatskanzlei) three decades later. But the relative decline of the older Imperial Chancellery (Reichshofkanzlei) had more to do with personal frictions than with any clear administrative strategy.28 The Court Chamber (Hofkammer) spawned a fiscal arm, called the Bancalita¨t, to liaise with a new Vienna City Bank; then a full Finanzkonferenz was established in 1714–16. But they appear to have had little tangible effect, and grave budgetary weakness remained. The cameralist ideas left by Ho¨rnigk and others were hardly invoked. No ear was lent to enterprisers like Schierl, with his plan for general diets as a consultative body for all the Habsburg lands, or to advocates of institutional reform in Bohemia.29 By the 1720s the court suffered from growing inertia. A Spanish party—the residue of Charles’s abortive Catalonian adventure—was able to sow discord (as their predecessors around Ferdinand I 200 years earlier had not, despite a better starting position). Above all, fears deepened of alienating any of the interest groups on which the Pragmatic Sanction depended. The document of 1723 makes celebrated provision for a Monarchy united ‘indivisibiliter et inseparabiliter’ (wording originally introduced from a previous Hungarian draft).30 Yet that portentous formulation seems almost casual, certainly vague and turbid. No detail of a real union between Hungary and the rest of the Habsburg lands was spelled out; whereas all Hungary’s (noble) privileges were now confirmed—thus no bureaucratic absolutism could be implemented. Hence, of course, the continuing recourse to, or at least connivance at, claims to absolute confessional authority, despite the alienation of non-Catholics thereby. The story was similar in Transylvania and Croatia: significant constitutional survival, but also resentment of interference and controls. For all the combative phraseology we have already encountered, no clear pattern of subordination emerged, either in the bodies through which Transylvania was governed or in the Commissio Neo-Acquistica and its successors with their powers in the southern regions. Actually it was Prince Ferenc II Ra´koćzi who showed himself more consistently centralist, mercantilist, and radical than his Habsburg contemporaries; and Ra´koćzi did tax the nobles. In this way the new greater Austria flaunted in its first phase a double exclusiveness: of one religious orthodoxy and one kind of political allegiance, the 28 Lothar Gross, Die Geschichte der deutschen Reichshofkanzlei von 1559 bis 1806 (V., 1933), 62 ff., 348–50. 29 J. W. Stoye, ‘Emperor Charles VI: The Early Years of the Reign’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xii (1962), 63–84; Brigitte Holl, Hofkammerpra¨sident Gundaker Thomas Graf Starhemberg und die o¨sterreichische Finanzpolitik der Barockzeit, 1703–15 (V., 1976); cf. Troćsańyi, Habsburg-politika, 31–143, passim. For Schierl, below, p. 247. 30 Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete, 1686–1790, 380.

14

Introduction

two bound together in a Habsburg reading of imperial tradition. That precluded the kind of tolerance and multinationality which, when (at least partially) introduced later, would lend the Monarchy renewed vigour. For the present, the Habsburgs thought their ‘refractory’ Protestants and ‘innocent’ Orthodox were marginal (and what of the Jews?); likewise all those—an overlapping category— who had borne the Turkish yoke and forfeited the fruits of civilization.31 But the newcomers would in time change the character of the Habsburg state, once Habsburg government had failed to change them. 31 Still less were those living in the Balkans proper considered: cf. Ivan Pa ˘rvev, Habsburgs and Ottomans between Vienna and Belgrade, 1683–1739 (Boulder, Colo., 1995), 289–302, a jumbled book, which draws the interesting conclusion that the Habsburgs neglected their best chance there because of other preoccupations.

PART I ABSOLUTIST ENLIGHTENMENT


2 Maria Theresa and Hungary This essay pursues the theme of Hungary’s place in the Habsburg Monarchy into the crucial period of centralist reform begun by Maria Theresa and continued by her son Joseph II (from whom derives the term ‘Josephinism’ often used to describe the whole process). On the whole Maria Theresa was able to cooperate with enough of the Hungarian ruling elite to achieve a significant part of her programme there. But elemental antagonisms remained—both as perceptions and as real vested interests— which would subsequently frustrate almost all Joseph’s measures. Moreover, even the successes of his mother left a broader gap between Hungary and the rest of the Habsburg lands, where institutional change went much faster and much further during this period.

Modern Habsburg history begins in 1740, with the accession of Maria Theresa as ruler over a group of realms which, lacking allies themselves, were immediately beleaguered by a hostile alliance of five European states. Over the next decades, especially after the temporary peace of 1748, and then between the final peace of 1763 and up to her death in 1780, her measures were piecemeal, but remarkably concrete and far-reaching, modernizing and consolidating those realms for the future. The modern Austro-Hungarian relationship was unveiled in these same decades. We find one aspect of it in the drama of September 1741, as the young Queen arrived to seek succour from a typically tempestuous and obstructive coronation diet at Pressburg. Attired in Hungarian style (white, with gold braid and blue floral decoration), she made a direct and emotional appeal to the assembled nobles, and evoked their famous offer of physical sacrifice, amid the general cry of ‘vitam nostram et sanguinem consecramus’.1 At the other extreme lies the hardly less dramatic diet of 1764–5, which concluded in bitterness and deadlock, with Maria Theresa pointedly absent, and was followed by fifteen years of direct rule from Vienna. Thus the two lines of policy alternately pursued in Originally printed in Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H. M. Scott (L.: Macmillan, 1990), 189–207, 329–30, 357–60. 1 Alfred von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias (10 vols., V., 1863–79), i. 256 ff., drawing on Gabriel Kolinovics, Nova Ungariae Periodus . . . sive Comitiorum Generalium . . . in anno 1741 . . . narratio, ed. M. G. Kovachich (Buda, 1790); cf. Henrik Marczali in HZ 117 (1917), 413–31. Strictly speaking, for bizarre constitutional reasons, Maria Theresa was King of Hungary: cf. E. Holzmair ¨ sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 72 (1964), 122–34. in Mitteilungen des Instituts fu¨r O

18

Absolutist Enlightenment

Habsburg governance of Hungary right down to 1918—by turns essentially respectful or disrespectful of constitutional tradition—were now first clearly elaborated in the context of the Empress’s transformation of the whole Monarchy. Yet the subject is little known to historians; perhaps because on the surface Hungary was the one area under Habsburg rule which did not change much. Its feudal economy and society and its corporate privileges, especially that of noble tax exemption, survived; a modus vivendi appeared to have been reached between the energetic but careful ruler and the loyal but unbending constitution. Indeed, what happened in ‘Austria’ (I shall use that term as shorthand for the rest of the Habsburg lands) was crucially important for Hungary too, precisely because it happened there alone: the development of an effective absolutism outside Hungary, and its associated realms of Croatia and Transylvania, increased the gap between the two halves of the Monarchy, and foreshadowed the ‘dualism’ of a later age. Thus, much of the reform programme had only an indirect impact on Hungary. For example, the new economic management, which impinged mainly through its effect on tariff policy and through the efforts at ‘impopulation’, or the settlement of foreign colonists upon lands recently recovered from the Turks; or measures in the fields of justice, policing, and local administration.2 Nevertheless, Maria Theresa’s government—and this is the most significant point of all—did gradually modify the great pillars of earlier Habsburg authority, as well as introducing new ones, throughout her realms; and in these last respects Hungary was hardly less affected than the rest. In briefest summary, the structural changes initiated from the 1740s onward contained a political-social, a cultural-ideological, and a dynastic-military element. In the first place, aristocratic and provincial oligarchy was supplemented by, and in good measure reorientated as, a centrally directed and standardized state service, with written forms and bureaucratic norms. Secondly, the Catholic church and religious precept were supplemented by, and in good measure reorientated as, a deliberate patriotism and state identity, based on increasingly material notions of the common weal—that terminology of ‘general good’ (allgemeines Wohlsein) or ‘the general best’ (das allgemeine Beste) or similar, which constantly recurs in the enactments of Habsburg absolutism. Finally, the army was harnessed by the mid-eighteenth century to fulfil a new role as a unifying and integrative factor in the defence of the dynastic state. Let us consider these changes in turn. 2 Unsurpassed studies of overall policy are in R. G. Plaschka et al. (ed.), O ¨ sterreich im Europa der Aufkla¨rung (2 vols., V., 1985), and Dickson, Finance and Government. For the economy, Gustav Otruba, Die Wirtschaftspolitik Maria Theresias (V., 1963), is still useful. The classic Hungarian diatribe against ‘colonialization’ by stealth is Ferenc Eckhart, A bećsi udvar gazdasa´gpolitika´ja Ma´ria Tere´zia ¨ sterreichs Bevo¨lkerungspolitik kora´ban (Bp., 1922). For the impopulation see Konrad Schu¨nemann, O unter Maria Theresia (Berlin [1935]).

Maria Theresa and Hungary

19

Even in Austria the reform movement needed to work through traditional notables, particularly, of course, reasonably enlightened and progressive ones. That was the more true in Hungary, where office remained restricted to the noble nation and many of the gentry were unwilling or ill-equipped to serve anyway. Resort could be had, in the first instance, to the established aristocratic families who at the start of the reign maintained the three chief organs of executive authority under the crown: the Chancellery, the Lieutenancy Council, and the Chamber. In each of them an expansion of business under Maria Theresa went with more professional management. The dutiful and diligent Hungarian Chancellor for over twenty years from 1762 was Count Ferenc Esterha´zy, who belonged to the senior branch of the richest and most powerful clan in the country (he was second cousin to Prince Nicholas, the celebrated Maecenas and patron of Joseph Haydn). Having been debated at the Chancellery in Vienna, whose senior personnel rose from 24 to 75 in this period, the sovereign’s decisions then passed for their implementation in Hungary to the Lieutenancy Council, under the Palatine (royal viceroy) or his deputy. There too the workload increased markedly: about 2,500 letters were received annually during the 1740s, over 10,000 by the 1770s; and the number of officials swelled from under 50 to 122 to handle it. There too magnates held sway, like Count Lajos Batthyańy, Palatine from 1751 to 1765 (and a previous Chancellor), who headed the second most prominent Hungarian family.3 Such men, besides being aristocrats, were also favourites and trusted agents of the Empress: Esterha´zy seems to have featured in court entertainments under the sobriquet of ‘Quinquin’, as well as being a gaming partner of her husband Francis; Batthyańy’s younger brother Ka´roly acted as tutor to the young Joseph II.4 Alternatively the ruler could reverse the strategy, by infiltrating preferred individuals into the aristocracy. One such was Ferenc Balassa, who became a key figure in the Lieutenancy Council for thirty years from 1756. More often similar elevations took place through the Hungarian Chamber, or treasury (Ungarische Hofkammer), which experienced still greater expansion under Maria Theresa: thanks to extra responsibilities, its receipts grew tenfold and its higher-grade employees trebled in number. Antal Grassalkovich, who had risen from obscurity to a dominant position on the Court of Appeal through his legal prowess, took over the presidency of the Chamber from 1748 until his death in 3 There is no proper history of either institution, but for the Lieutenancy Council see Gyo ˝zo˝ Ember, A magyar kira´lyi helytarto´tanaćs u¨gyinte´ze´seńek to¨rteńete, 1724–1848 (Bp., 1940), and Ibolya Felho˝ and Antal Vo¨ro¨s, A helytarto´tanaćsi leve´lta´r (Bp., 1961). On officialdom, cf. Zoltań Fallenbu¨chl in Die Verwaltung, 14 (1981), 329–50. Personal details have to be pieced together individually from such works as Ivań Nagy, Magyarorsza´g csala´dai (8 vols., Pest, 1857–68); Constant von Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich (60 vols., V., 1856–91); and Jo´zsef Szinnyei, Magyar ´ıro´k élete és munkaí (14 vols., Bp., 1891–1913). 4 Regular mentions of both in Johann J. Khevenhu ¨ ller-Metsch, Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias. Tagebuch, ed. R. Khevenhu¨ller-Metsch and H. Schlitter (8 vols., V., 1907–72), i–v (for Esterha´zy’s name, see ibid. i. 239, ii. 125).

20


1771, and built up the crown’s and his own personal revenue in dramatic fashion. In the next generation Pa´l Festetics, son of another acquisitive judge, made himself as indispensable for the management of the 1764 diet as had Grassalkovich in 1741, and became senior adviser simultaneously to both the Viennese and the Hungarian Chambers.5 Balassa, Grassalkovich, and Festetics may have bettered themselves substantially in office, but all entered it as native and noble-born Hungarians, in accordance with the provisions of the constitution. The same was true of the Chief Justice, Gyo¨rgy Fekete, and his brother-in-law, the formidable Chancellery councillor Kristo´f Niczky, of Antal Brunswick, Ferenc Xaver Koller, and others who acquired the title of count for their services to Maria Theresa and whose biographies, if ascertainable (in Koller’s case even the elementary information is confused), would tell us much about her style of government in Hungary. At the top there appears to be only one exception: the Saxon prince, Albert, son-in-law to the Empress, and again a favourite, if of rather a different sort, who took over the duties of Palatine after Batthyańy’s death, but only as royal lieutenant and without the statutory election at a diet.6 Lower down, especially in the Chamber, we can certainly find a few Germans or Austrians, such as Anton Cothmann, a shadowy but manifestly influential immigrant from Westphalia; but again these are exceptional. More typical in his background, albeit remarkable in his gifts, was the cameral official Wolfgang (or Farkas) Kempelen, born at Pressburg in 1734. Basically a reformist administrator with special responsibility for the fabric of Habsburg palaces, for impopulation, and for the vital royal salt monopoly, Kempelen’s memory lives on, when his seniors are long forgotten, as the inventor of water projectiles, notably the giant fountains at Scho¨nbrunn, of a chess automaton which fascinated monarchs from Maria Theresa via Frederick the Great to Napoleon, and of an artificial head able to reproduce the sounds of the human voice.7 The acid test of these intensified Hungarian administrative arrangements came with the first of only two major enactments by Maria Theresa for the country: the Urbarium, or peasant regulation of 1767. Whereas political change there generally limped behind the pace set in the rest of the Monarchy, the agrarian nettle was grasped earlier in Hungary than elsewhere. In fact the two issues are closely connected, for it was precisely Hungarian recalcitrance in other matters which precipitated confrontation on the peasant question. Hard 5 Istva ń Nagy, A magyar kamara, 1686–1848 (Bp., 1971); Zoltań Fallenbu¨chl in Leve´lta´ri Ko¨zlemenyek, 41 (1970), 259–336, and id., Grassalkovich Antal: hivatalnok és f o˝nemes a XVIII. sza´zadban (Go¨do¨llo˝, 1996). For Balassa, see Istvań Ka´llay in Leve´lta´ri Ko¨zlemeńyek, xliv–xliv (1974), 247–69. 6 On Albert, see Walter Koschatzky in Maria Theresia als Ko ¨nigin von Ungarn: Ausstellung Schloß Halbturn ([Eisenstadt], 1980), 30–7; Maria Vyvı´jalova´, in Historicky´ Cˇasopis, 44 (1996), 383–97; Katalin Kulcsa´r in Aetas (2002), no. 1, 51–65. Cf. below, p. 72. 7 On Kempelen: Imre Ko˝szegi and Ja ńos Pap, Kempelen Farkas (Bp., 1955), and long entry in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v.


21

bargaining at and between diets—because of war only two could be summoned during the first half of the reign—left the still untaxed noble nation looking out of line. The new Council of State (Staatsrat), established in Vienna in 1761 as a supreme advisory body, immediately turned its attention to obtaining relief for Her Majesty’s Hungarian taxpayers, who also provided the rank and file in her Hungarian regiments; its more forthright members, like the State Chancellor, Kaunitz, and the Swabian-born Borie´, said much in private about the iniquity of their burdens.8 In 1764, faced with near-bankruptcy at the end of the Seven Years War, Maria Theresa made one more attempt to win the diet’s approval for a higher level of voluntary grant. But when the estates, thoroughly mistrustful by now of ‘Austrian’ methods of government, insisted on the redress of their own grievances— 228 separate items—in return, she ordered the material condition of the peasantry to be placed on the active agenda. Now came a catalyst, in the form of rural disturbance in western Hungary (perhaps encouraged from Vienna). This allowed the government to dictate solutions: first piecemeal, then in the form of a national standard for dues and obligations adjusted to local conditions; and to impose them against much resistance in the counties. On crown lands and estates which escheated to the ruler under the ancient Hungarian inheritance law of aviticitas, Maria Theresa tried to go further still in the direction of tenants’ guarantees. Moreover, the impopulation activity which likewise reached its climax in the 1760s and 1770s shared some of the same ulterior motive.9 This severest crisis in the Queen’s Hungarian policies, which caused her to suspend the office of Palatine, as we have already seen, and to prorogue the diet indefinitely, also proved a severe embarrassment for her leading servants there. The unease of their collective response was exacerbated by the fact that many of their own peasants stood in the forefront of the rebellion. Were they actually the most exploited by their masters? Certainly Maria Theresa was ready to believe so: ‘It is only the cruelty of their lords which has driven these wretched people to such extremes. Would you believe that the late palatine [Lajos Batthyańy], prince [Ka´roly] batyani, the esterhazi are the most hardened oppressors: that makes one shudder.’10 At all events these Transdanubian peasants felt most exploited, because of the development over recent decades of demesne farming and 8 For the Austrian origins of the Urbarium, see various articles by Gyo ˝zo˝ Ember: originally in Sz. 59 (1935), 554–664, and in A Bećsi Magyar To¨rteńeti Inte´zet E´vko¨nyve, 5 (1935), 103–49; much of this then rendered into German in Acta Historica (Bp.), 6 (1959), 105–53, 331–71; 7 (1960), ¨ sterreich unter 149–87; and again in summary form in A. M. Drabek et al. (ed.), Ungarn und O Maria Theresia und Joseph II. (V., 1982), 43–54. Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism, 1753–80 (Camb., 1994), 155 ff., 320 ff. 9 For the diet: Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, vii. 105 ff. For the making of the Urbarium: Dezso˝ Szabo´, A magyarorsza´gi u´rbe´rrendeze´s to¨rteńete Ma´ria Tere´zia kora´ban (Bp., 1933); K. Vo¨ro¨s in Tanulmańyok a parasztsa´g to¨rteńete´hez Magyarorsza´gon, 1711–90, ed. Gy. Spira (Bp., 1952), 299–383; summary by Ferenc Eckhart in Sz. 90 (1956), 69–125, at 69 ff. For resistance to it: Dezso˝ Szabo´, A megye´k ellena´lla´sa Ma´ria Tere´zia u´rbe´ri rendeleteivel szemben (Bp., 1934). 10 Quoted Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, vii. 535.

22


long-distance trading to supply neighbouring Austrian markets, which demanded extra inputs of their labour; and they were better able, by some contact with a more cultured west, to articulate their discontents. Yet on the whole the administration succeeded in accommodating or modifying these policies. An elaborate memorandum by Esterha´zy persuaded the Queen to respect constitutional channels as far as possible. The most important practical advice was tendered by two of the new men: by Festetics, who looked to set up contractual relations on the land, enforced by ordinance as necessary, and whose intimate links in those years with Maria Theresa and her cabinet secretary, Cornelius Neny, are documented in his correspondence; and by Balassa, who appears to have been the brains behind the actual mechanism adopted, of a sliding scale based on the size of an optimum peasant holding in regions of different fertility. On balance, in other words, the new administrative cadre mediated between Vienna (especially the Council of State) and the nation, sat on the mixed Austro-Hungarian urbarial commission which settled the details, then acted as royal commissioners to implement them; just as it was men like Grassalkovich, Cothmann, and Kempelen who supervised the process of impopulation on both public and private estates.11 By the 1770s, as the storm abated, a plethora of other measures could be coordinated by the Lieutenancy Council and issued to counties and other localities as so-called normalia (we should not, strictly speaking, describe them as legislation, since they lacked the sanction of the diet). The homo regius, Archduke Albert, the director of whose personal chancellery was Kempelen, proved reasonably sympathetic to domestic interests; while aristocrats old and new, as royalappointed high sheriffs (supremi comites) in the counties, could do much to ensure that normalia on commerce, justice, finance, health, communications, and the rest would be obeyed. Especially significant were the many enactments in the field of religion and education, to which we shall now turn as evidence of the cultural and ideological preoccupations of reforming absolutism.

For some 150 years before 1740 the intellectual underpinning to the authority of the Austrian Habsburgs had been Roman Catholic orthodoxy as defined by the Council of Trent. The Prussian challenge—the challenge of a more enlightened Protestantism as well as of a more effective governmental machine—soon made it clear to Maria Theresa that this orthodoxy, like its long-standing administrative 11 Implementation of the Urbarium in Karol Rebro, Urba ´ rska regulaćia Ma´rie Tere´zie a poddanske´ u´pravy Jozefa II. na Slovensku (Brat., 1959), and I. Felho˝ et al. (ed.), Az u´rbe´res birtokviszonyok Magyarorsza´gon Ma´ria Tere´zia kora´ban, vol. i: Dunańtu´l (Bp., 1970). One copy of Esterha´zy’s memorandum is in Orsza´gos Leve´lta´r (National Archives, Budapest, hereafter OL), I 50 ´ rbe´rrendeze´s, 627–33. For Festetics, Rebro, Urba´rska reg1, fasc. A; another printed in Szabo´, U ulaćia, 62–5, and OL P 245 24: letters from Maria Theresa, ibid. 25: letters from Neny. For Balassa ´ rbe´rrendeze´s, 18–22, 139 ff., 167–9, 304 ff., 548–81. see Szabo´, U


23

forms, could no longer sustain the Monarchy. How then should it be adapted or appropriated to the renewal of the state? Not, it must be stressed at the outset, by any abdication from the absolute spiritual claims of the Roman Catholic church vis-a`-vis other Christians or unbelievers. Maria Theresa firmly believed in her rule as a monarch by divine right, and in her duties as guardian of Catholic values. That applied most particularly in her Hungarian domains, where the whole Counter-Reformation only generated belated fervour during the eighteenth century, and which still harboured the Monarchy’s only large populations of non-Catholics. ‘Religion yet has much good to do in Hungary’, as she commented in the early 1750s.12 Thus the assault on other churches continued unabated throughout the reign, or at least until its very last years. Evictions, especially of Calvinist congregations, occurred alongside the forced resettlement of Austrian Lutherans in Hungary; continuous pressure was exerted on towns—and again Calvinists in royal boroughs like Debrecen fared worst—to elect Catholic councillors or observe Catholic feast days. The struggle against the Heidelberg Catechism and against Protestant editions of the Bible—which were more or less officially proscribed— went with active proselytizing, often Jesuit-led, on a broad front.13 Campaigns against the Eastern Orthodox to found and extend Uniate churches among Rumanians, Ruthenes, and Serbs tell their own story: the regular frustration and miscalculation of the authorities only highlight their wildly doctrinaire presuppositions in imagining that they could impose such solutions.14 Intolerant outreach was matched by official exclusiveness. Protestant e´lites, the most important aspect of Hungarian cultural distinctiveness, had no chance to participate in government or administration, however loyal they might be, apart from the special case of Transylvania (and even there the small minority of Catholics tended to be favoured). The Roman Catholic hierarchy, on the other hand, remained formally involved both in senior royal counsels and in the local executive, most significantly through the person of Jo´zsef Batthyańy, second son of Lajos, a long-serving member of the Lieutenancy Council during the years when he rose to become archbishop, cardinal, and primate of the country. For that reason, among others, the Hungarian authorities proved less responsive over 12 Quoted Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, iv. 3; religious background in Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 247 ff. 13 Evictions: Olive ´r Piszker, Barokk vila´g Gyo˝regyha´zmegye´ben Zıćhy Ferenc gro´f pu¨spo¨kse´ge idejeń, 1743–83 (Pannonhalma, 1933), 48 ff.; Sańdor Nyiri, A nagybirtok valla´su¨gyi magatarta´sa a 18. sza´zadban (Bp., 1941); Joachim Bahlcke, on the militant bishop, Ma´rton Padańyi Bı´ro´, in AHY 31 (2000), 15–32, and in id., Ungarischer Episkopat 225–42. Resettlement: Hans von Zwiedineck¨ G 53 (1875), 457–546; Erich Buchinger, Die ‘Landler’ in Siebenbu¨rgen (Mun., Su¨denhorst in AO 1980). Towns: Imre Re´ve´sz, Bećs Debrecen ellen: Va´zlatok Domokos Lajos élete´bo˝l és mu˝ko˝de´se´bo˝l (Bp., 1966). Catechism: Tama´s Esze in A Heidelbergi Ka´te´ to¨rteńete Magyarorsza´gon, ed. T. Bartha (Bp., 1965), 169–203. 14 Schwicker, Geschichte der Serben, esp. ch. 4; id. in AO ¨ G 52 (1875), 275–400. Keith Hitchins, L’Ideé de nation chez les Roumains de Transylvanie, 1691–1849 (Buch., 1987), esp. ch. 3.

24


confessional grievance in this period than the Council of State, to which Protestants could appeal through an agent stationed in Vienna.15 Yet this ecclesiastical establishment in fact changed markedly during the reign of Maria Theresa. In the first place, the balance of forces between church and state tilted in the direction of the latter. While Austria experienced major Erastian developments from the 1750s, as the state took a tighter hold on church revenues, restricted the freedoms of monasteries, curbed the powers of the papacy, etc. (those measures which first gave rise to the term ‘Josephinism’, though they are now seen as having been initiated by Kaunitz and the Empress), parallel developments took place in Hungary. In 1758 Maria Theresa—‘as an adornment for the kingdom of Hungary’—revived the title, originally granted to St Stephen, of ‘apostolic’ ruler, which carried an implication of the monarch’s enhanced authority in spiritual matters.16 During the early 1760s she went a step further in refurbishing royal claims by encouraging her librarian, Adam Franz Kolla´r, himself a Hungarian, to publish two books whose titles sufficiently indicate their line of argument: Historia diplomatica iuris patronatus Apostolicorum Hungariae Regum (‘Documentary History of the Rights of [Ecclesiastical] Patronage of the Apostolic Kings of Hungary’) and De Originibus et usu perpetuo potestatis legislatoriae circa sacra Apostolico rum Regum Ungariae (‘On the Origins of Legislative Power in the Ecclesiastical Sphere and its Perpetual Exercise by the Apostolic Kings of Hungary’). Kolla´r’s work created a furore at the diet of 1764, despite the inoffensive manner of its presentation (with the sting in his long Latin footnotes!): the Hungarian opposition could see that the court library lay not far from the cabinet office. Not only were clerical privileges more intact in Hungary than in Austria; an attack on them could also more clearly be associated with an attack on noble privilege—we may discern, mutatis mutandis, some similarities with the clash a few years earlier between Machault d’Arnouville and the French episcopate. The battle proved fierce but inconclusive; it held up the diet’s proceedings for a whole month, and led to the withdrawal, but not the recantation, of Kolla´r’s theses. The wildest diatribe against the crown, a pamphlet entitled Vexatio dat intellectum by one of the archbishop’s chaplains, was burned on the orders of Maria Theresa.17 The Kolla´r affair, with its mildly anti-establishment overtones, coincided with, and formed part of, the struggle over the Urbarium; yet—more than 15 Boriska Ravasz, A magyar a ´ llam és a protestantizmus Ma´ria Tere´zia uralkoda´sańak ma´sodik fele´ben (Bp., 1935); Eleme´r Ma´lyusz, A tu¨relmi rendelet (2 vols., Bp., 1939), esp. i. 127 ff., on the Staatsrat. Sketch of Batthyańy in Antal Meszleńyi, A magyar hercegprı´ma´sok arcke´psorozata (Bp., 1970), 122–46; and cf. below, pp. 52f. 16 Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, ix. 8–10. 17 Franz Krones, Ungarn unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II. (Graz, 1871), pt. 1; Andor Csizmadia in Historicky´ Cˇasopis, xii (1964), 215–36; Maria Vyvı´jalova´ in G. Mraz (ed.), Maria Theresia als Ko¨nigin von Ungarn (Eisenstadt, 1984), 125–36; documents in Der Josephinismus: ¨ sterreich, ed. F. Maass (5 vols., V., 1951–61), i. On the Vexatio: Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in O Gyo˝zo˝ Concha in Sz. 14 (1880), 590–7; Joachim Bahlcke, in Historicke´ Sˇtu´die, 40 (1999), 35–50, and in id., Ungarischer Episkopat, 274–87.


25

that—it contained a large element of shadow-boxing, since the cultural attitudes of the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy were also shifting, pari passu with those of the reformist regime. Thus other changes, like a substantial diocesan reorganization, could proceed with active local support—even that of the author of the Vexatio—although they had not been approved by Rome.18 Most important of these changes was the second fundamental piece of Maria-Theresan ‘legislation’ for Hungary: the Ratio Educationis of 1777. Like the Urbarium ten years earlier, this major pedagogical initiative originated fortuitously in part (it followed the pope’s decision to dissolve the Jesuit order), but then bore the fruit of intense ¨ rmeńyi; by administrative planning: by Brunswick and his younger colleague, U Festetics, who had studied at Lutheran Leipzig with Gottsched, and Niczky, an alumnus of the Theresianum in Vienna; by Kolla´r and others.19 The result was a long and detailed programme for Catholic schooling at all levels, in a framework of vigorous state control, with a stress on training for citizenship (Protestant educational institutions, while not directly addressed, were evidently expected to follow suit). And the Ratio represented merely the capstone on a series of more piecemeal measures which culminated in the 1770s, ranging from the foundation of a mining academy with European catchment at Schemnitz (Selmecbańya) in the north, to an intensive effort to inculcate the rudiments of knowledge in backward Orthodox peoples of the Banat in the south.20 Educational reform was thus made possible by cooperation between Maria Theresa’s government—launching similar initiatives elsewhere in the Monarchy, though without quite such a clear blueprint—and her Hungarian administrators. It articulated much of their own cultural orientation: a moderate receptivity to enlightened influences from abroad, but anchored in local Latinate traditions, and with an explicit but subordinate place for domestic vernaculars, especially German. It enjoined more teaching of Hungarian subjects, particularly law, so long as they were suitably glossed in a royalist sense—since the mid1760s that had been the task, at Maria Theresa’s personal request, of Festetics, whose portrait in Budapest’s National Gallery depicts him with the Corpus Juris Hungarici at his elbow.21 18 Josef Tomko, Die Errichtung der Dio ¨zesen Zips, Neusohl und Rosenau, 1776, und das ko¨nigliche Patronatsrecht in Ungarn (V., 1968). 19 Istva ń Me´sza´ros, Ratio Educationis: az 1777-i és az 1806-i kiada´s magyar nyelvu˝ fordı´ta´sa (Bp., 1981), prints the text; detailed assessment in Domokos Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s a XVIII. sza´zadi Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1980), 403 ff. 20 Schemnitz: Josef Vlachovic ˇ in Z Dejin Vied a Techniky na Slovensku, 3 (1964), 33–95; reheated in German in Wissenschaftspolitik in Mittel- und Osteuropa . . . im 18. und beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert, ed. E. Amburger et al. (Berlin, 1976), 206–20; Jozef Voza´r in Maria Theresia, ed. Mraz, 171–82. Banat: Mita Kostic´, Grof Koler kao kulturnoprosvetni reformator kod Srba u Ugarskoi u XVIII. veku (Belgrade, 1932); Hans Wolf, Das Schulwesen des Temesvarer Banats im 18. Jahrhundert (Baden bei Wien, 1935); Philip J. Adler in Slavic Review, 33 (1974), 23–45. 21 OL P 245 24: letters from Maria Theresa, 7 May 1765, 18 July 1765, 27 March 1766; ibid. 11, fasc. 12, passim. Cf., for the new university syllabus, Calendarium regiae universitatis Budensis ad annum . . . 1779 (Buda, 1779).

26


Many of these people, clergy hardly less than laity, were cultivated, even learned, in a highly cosmopolitan way. We can see that in their libraries and collections: Esterha´zy’s at Csekle´sz, or Festetics’s concentrated upon coins (which are likewise shown on his portrait); Jo´zsef Batthyańy primus inter pares among the prelates, expending vast sums to acquire source materials for Hungarian history. We can see it too in their linguistic practice. Official usage still firmly insisted on Latin, which appears dominant in all political and administrative contexts, except in the business of the Chamber and in dealings with the army. There and elsewhere it was being chipped at by German, and much less by Magyar, though the latter had a vital role in the management of landed estates (as a Slav vernacular might also have, especially in Croatia or in the north). Magyar formed the regular language of conversation and correspondence within the e´lite; but German was needed, not just for Austrian contacts, but as the leading medium in many Hungarian towns; while Latin remained in frequent private use too, a living tongue as well as a formalized lingua franca. French was increasingly preferred for many holograph letters, as an index of culture and status: the Batthyańy family correspond in it among themselves by the 1740s; Festetics corresponds with his father in Hungarian, but with his own son in French; and it is surprising how many clerics use it too, among them the conservative but worldly-wise Migazzi, Archbishop of Vienna and a diocesan in Hungary as well.22

This is the bewildering world of a ruling group often quadrilingual in Magyar, Latin, German, and French, whose members might also learn some Italian and remember the rudiments of a local Slavonic tongue acquired in youth. (But we should note that many Hungarian lesser nobles, parish priests, or merchants were themselves at least trilingual.) What contexts or preferences determined the choice of one tongue rather than another? That question would provide scope for a separate investigation. Here we should rather seek to place such linguistic cosmopolitanism in the framework of a wider problem of identity posed by contemporary attempts from Vienna to build not only a new Austrian state, but with it a new loyalty to Austrian statehood. The latter has strangely been much less discussed than the former, yet it is a purpose arguably implicit in the governmental ideal of bureaucratic service: the wash of official self-justification in terms of the ‘common good’ and similar phrases seems to demand as its corollary a concept of state patriotism, which would likewise warrant a separate investigation to do it justice. Essentially the endeavour was a practical rather than a theoretical one, whose most important intellectual formulation appeared with 22 These comments rest largely on autopsy, e.g. of the Batthya ńy correspondence in OL P 1314, and of Pa´l Festetics’s, ibid., P 245 24 and 25. There is no proper study. But Daniel Rapant, K pocˇiatkom mad’arizaćie (2 vols., Brat., 1927–31), i, contains much good information; and cf. the sounding by Claude Michaud in Dix-huitie`me Sie`cle, 12 (1980), 327–79.


27

the teacher and commentator Joseph von Sonnenfels. Sonnenfels’s book (to which we shall return in later chapters) about love for the fatherland—Vaterland, another vogue word of the period—looks to a ‘nation of patriots’ who cultivate citizenship by such means as economic development and the codification of law.23 But which territory was the ‘Vaterland’? Did it include or exclude Hungary; and what implications did the notion carry for the government’s backers there? Sonnenfels remained vague, but he seemed to be looking to the Gesamtmonarchie, the Habsburg lands as a whole. So was the Council of State, which explicitly condemned the Hungarian constitution as a front for ‘Nationalismus’, in an interesting early use of that term. In fact the Staatsrat, particularly Kaunitz and Borie´, embodied an anti-Hungarian ethos which, still feeding on the experience of the civil wars between the 1680s and 1711 that we encountered in the last chapter, stressed the crown’s rights of conquest, stamped local discontents as treachery, condemned ‘barbarian’ practices, and looked to a civilizing mission. It was committed to subsuming regionalisms in some ‘Austrian’ totality.24 So, a fortiori, was Maria Theresa, whom the Staatsrat served in a still dynastic enterprise. Yet the matter is not so clean-edged. She was certainly ‘Austrian’ in one respect, as her predecessors had not been: though the wife and mother of emperors, she found herself divorced from the traditions of the German Empire, both before and after the death of her husband, in different ways. The identification with Austria could only be enhanced by the very defence of it against a Prussian- and Bavarian-led ‘Germany’, which formed a novelty in Habsburg history. By the same token, however, this identification did not necessarily work against the status of Hungary. Indeed, it might enhance that too: the Hungarian crown was the only part of Maria Theresa’s territories in 1740 which had always stood outside the Holy Roman Empire, and it provided her chief royal title, even after Francis’s imperial election in 1745. It also provided the Habsburgs with their ostensible claims to Galicia and Dalmatia—Kolla´r (again!) and the Croat canon, Krcˇelic´, were pressed into service to justify those claims in print.25 In the event only thirteen towns of the Zips (Szepesse´g), which had been pledged to Poland since the early fifteenth century, returned to Hungary at the time of the First Partition (and Venice still clung to Dalmatia); but Maria Theresa did take important steps by the end of her reign towards re-creating the integral kingdom of St Stephen demanded by patriots. On the one hand she incorporated parts of the Military Frontier and then (1778) the whole of the Banat of Temesva´r, which had been administered directly from Vienna since the expulsion of the Turks. That initiative had been urged upon her by Hungarians of all shadings, even quite For Sonnenfels, cf. below, pp. 43, 62, 64, 67f., 138. Ember in Sz. 69 (1935), at 578 ff.; Szabo, Kaunitz, 303–45. 25 A. F. Kolla ´r, Vorlaüfige Ausfu¨hrung der Rechte des Ko¨nigreichs Hungarn auf . . . Reußen und Podolien (V., 1772); Balthasar Kercselich, De Regnis Dalmatiae, Croatiae, Sclavoniae notitiae praeliminares (Zagreb, [1770]). On Kercselich/Krcˇelic´, cf. below, p. 144. 23 24

28


forcibly by Archduke Albert; and her trusted bureaucrats, especially Niczky, took the lead in implementing it. On the other hand Maria Theresa granted Hungary a seaport at Fiume on the Adriatic (1776), then abolished the separate Lieutenancy Council for Croatia in 1779.26 At the same time she allowed more domestic control over the fiscal implications of these changes through the expansion of the Hungarian Chamber which we have already encountered. These policies are not easy to interpret. They were not merely concessions: the timing does not fit, since opposition had reached its peak in the mid-l760s; but nor were they consistently followed. Over the largest territorial grievance, Transylvania, the Habsburg government pursued a fairly deliberate strategy of divide and rule. That is evident from the discussions surrounding its decision to underline Transylvania’s two and more centuries of separation with a decree, in the significant year 1765, elevating it to the rank of Grand Principality. There the Military Frontier was actually extended and a new taxation system introduced, while the authorities courted the Orthodox population (at least in its Greek-Catholic guise) and favoured the local Saxons, notably Samuel Brukenthal, as a counterweight to the Magyars.27 Moreover, in the case of Hungary proper, the acknowledgement of autonomous status could serve as a ruse. A revealing debate took place at the end of the 1760s on Joseph II’s proposition that Festetics should join the all-Austrian Staatsrat; but the conclusion was reached that it would be better not to advertise thereby that body’s de facto handling of Hungarian business.28 No doubt even the proven loyalist Festetics aroused misgivings among some in high places in Vienna. Yet the decision was also designed to spare Hungarian sensibilities: Esterha´zy had argued strongly against Festetics’s appointment. It seems a fair assumption that enough pluralism of identity existed on both sides to admit of real ambiguity. A proper analysis of the issue would demand close attention to such things as linguistic usage. For example did German-speakers refer to Hungary (when they did not call her a kingdom) as a Reich, with that word’s strongly autonomous implications, or as a Land, which carried overtones of the merely provincial? Did they describe her diet as a Reichstag or as a Landtag? Maria Theresa, Kaunitz, and others do not seem to have been able to make up their minds. In one letter of 1766 the Empress writes to Festetics that his revision of the Corpus Juris Hungarici should serve ‘the general good of the Reich’—which 26 Zips: Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, viii, passim. Banat: ibid. x. 121–9; Jeno˝ Szentkla ´ray, Gro´f Niczky Kristo´f életrajza (Pozsony, 1885). Fiume: below, n. 39. 27 Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, x. 131–58, 769. Georg A. Schuller, Samuel von Brukenthal (2 vols., Mun., 1967–9), is massively informative (i.172 ff. for the 1765 episode, in which, however, the principality’s Magyar Chancellor, Count Ga´bor Bethlen, played a greater part). Military Frontier: Carl Go¨llner, Die siebenbu¨rgische Milita¨rgrenze . . . 1762–1851 (Mun., 1974); Valeriu Sˇotropa, Districtul gra˘niceresc na˘sa˘udean (Cluj, 1975). Orthodox subjects: Matthias Bernath, Habsburg und die Anfa¨nge der ruma¨nischen Nationsbildung (Leiden, 1972). Cf. below, chs. 9 and 12. 28 Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, ix. 302–5; Carl von Hock and Hermann I. Bidermann, Der o¨sterreichische Staatsrat (V., 1879), 26; Ember in Sz. 69 (1935), at 563 f.; Szabo, Kaunitz, 107 f., 312; Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. i: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–80 (Camb., 1987), 213 f.


29

the context reveals to be the whole Habsburg Monarchy—provided it eliminates aspects ‘which are detrimental not only to the King [herself], but to the Reich [of Hungary] and its estates themselves’.29 What of Hungarian perceptions of Austria? It seems clear that those who rallied to the cause of modernization and rose in the royal service were also often those with some first-hand impressions of life and culture across the western frontier. Conventional wisdom recognizes that many more Hungarians lived in Austria, mainly in Vienna, during the eighteenth century. But no concerted study has been made of them, and it appears to be assumed that they stayed either as visitors, in which case the experience formed merely an episode (albeit perhaps an extended one, like that of the 117 Hungarians educated at the newly founded Theresianum between 1749 and 1774),30 or as long-term residents who were simply ‘denationalized’ and assimilated. In fact we find very few Hungarians in purely ‘Austrian’ jobs—that was the quid pro quo for the fairly strict protection of Hungarian posts (formally through the requirement of indigenatus, or naturalization; informally through the practical need for local legal knowledge). Hardly any served in the civil administration, except for some dual membership of Austrian and Hungarian Chambers; and whereas Koller took over one important central office from 1767 as head of the Illyrian Deputation, his work in the Banat manifestly had a Hungarian flavour too (the more so in retrospect). A handful became ambassadors—Miklo´s Esterha´zy, Ferenc’s brother, in Spain and Russia, then the great Orientalist and bibliophile, Ka´roly Reviczky, in Poland and England—or attained prominent positions at court. Ka´roly Batthyańy, as we saw, gained the coveted position of preceptor to Archduke Joseph; Kolla´r succeeded Gerard van Swieten as court librarian. Kolla´r came from simple circumstances in one of the Slovak-settled counties of northern Hungary. To describe him for that reason, as one biographer has done, as ‘the most successful Slovak in the history of the Habsburg Monarchy’, is patently anachronistic and smacks of misplaced national zeal. Yet the assertion contains a grain of truth: Kolla´r does betray—in certain other of his scholarly passages—a pride in his Slav ancestry.31 More generally and significantly, he continued to display a loyalty to the Hungarian realm, for all that he owed his preferment squarely to imperial patronage. So much the more did the rest of his fellowcountrymen, even the permanent officials of the Chancellery, who, despite their acceptance of the Austrian environment, seem to have remained on the fringes of real power in Vienna. Those who operated from within the country, concentrated in the little city of Pressburg just across the border, had still weaker links with the 29

OL P 245 24: letter from Maria Theresa, 27 March 1766. Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 107; Olga Khavanova, in The First Millennium of Hungary in Europe, ed. K. Papp et al. (Debrecen, 2002), 264–8. 31 Jan Tibensky ´ , Slovensky´ Sokrates: Zˇivot a dielo Adama Frantisˇka Kolla´ra (Brat., 1983); id. in Historicky´ Cˇasopis (Brat.), 31 (1983), 371–93. Dezso˝ Du¨mmerth, in Filolo´giai Ko¨zlo¨ny, 12 (1966), 391–413, agrees with this reading of Kolla´r, and condemns him for his anti-Magyar animus. 30

30


court, though their correspondence with Viennese patrons suggests how much they had come to look to it for favours.32 Among the greatest favours it could bestow was the new Order of St Stephen in its various gradations, established by Maria Theresa in 1764 to reward especially the activity of Hungarians in the public service both of their native land and of the Monarchy as a whole.

One further key institution demands investigation in this context (although we still know comparatively little about it): the army. The Austrian army furnished the third new bulwark of Habsburg power in the eighteenth century, and in some ways the most novel, though it was also the most intimately dynastic. Now the military became for the first time a permanent, large and coherent force, closely associated with the state apparatus and drawn from all parts of the Monarchy, including Hungary.33 A law of 1715 authorized the recruitment of Hungarian contingents for the standing army; the wars of the 1740s first witnessed a great body of Hungarians fighting outside their own theatre of battle. They displayed considerable verve and enjoyed marked success: from that time dates the European reputation of the hussar cavalry and of pandours, heyducks, and other irregular foot-soldiers. Hungary provided a dozen or so generals in the 1740s, more later: from the veteran Jańos Pa´lffy, already too corpulent to mount his horse; through Ka´roly Batthyańy and Ferenc Na´dasdy, who distinguished themselves in the defence of the Austrian Netherlands and the conquest of Bavaria; to Andra´s Hadik, commander of the troops which sacked Berlin in 1757. Their exploits of course go far to explain Maria Theresa’s gratitude towards their country, which naturally included personal favours too: Pa´lffy was raised to the dignity of Palatine at her instance in 1741; Batthyańy secured his prized but ticklish assignment as tutor; Na´dasdy fully restored his family to the status forfeited when his grandfather of the same name had been executed for treason in 1671. Thus the army also began to function as the only normal channel through which Hungarians could rise outside their own hierarchy: the self-made Hadik, for example, became successively President of the Imperial War Council, governor of Transylvania, and then of Galicia.34 32 A single example is the correspondence of the socialite, Baroness Grass, with the high-flying Balassa, in OL P 1765 59, nos. 2,946–62. 33 Major new treatment by Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, esp. 291–329; cf. id. in German History, 17 (1999), 141–76. Handy institutional survey by Christopher Duffy, The Army of Maria Theresa (L., 1977) and id., Instrument of War: The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War, vol. i (L., 2000); Thomas M. Barker, Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy: Essays on War, Society, and Government in Austria, 1618–1780 (Boulder, Colo., 1982), in fact hardly deals with the period after 1740. Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, passim, describes the wars in detail. For Hungarians: Jo´zsef Zachar, in Hadto¨rteńelmi Ko¨zlemeńyek, 110 (1997), 3–46. 34 Cf. now Gy. Farkas (ed.), Ma ´ ria Tere´zia hadveze´re: Va´logata´s Hadik Andra´s ta´borszernagy Hadto¨rteńelmi leve´lta´rban o˝rzo¨tt irataibo´l (Bp., 2000); ead. (ed.), Ma´ria Tere´zia hadveze´re: Hadik Andra´s Hadto¨rteńelmi leve´lta´rban o˝rzo¨tt iratainak leve´lta´ri sege´dlete (Bp., 2002).


31

Army discipline and long postings in other parts of the Monarchy, even if dictated by military preparedness rather than by any grand political plan, evidently represented a good school for Austrian loyalty, and scope for advancement depended on that. Yet there was much more to eighteenth-century military life, not least the considerable opportunity for wider experience and freer thought that it offered (at least to higher ranks). Enlightenment in the Habsburg lands was often promoted by soldiers or ex-soldiers: Petrasch, Kinsky, even Sonnenfels are outstanding examples, and plenty of Hungarian cases could be adduced too.35 Equally the army did not necessarily extinguish Hungarian sentiment in its officers, and might have had quite the reverse effect. The new Hungarian Royal Bodyguard, founded in 1760 as an e´lite corps open to provincial nobles, including Protestants (but with the opulent Prince Miklo´s Esterha´zy as its Captain), soon demonstrated that, even if it bound socially, it could loose culturally: several of its members swiftly turned to the emergent cause of vernacular Magyar literature.36 Pride in military achievements could therefore be a force which strengthened both Austrian consciousness in a wider sense and Hungarian consciousness within it. There is an interesting vignette to illustrate this in a curious little piece of doggerel entitled Lettre a` Voltaire ou plainte d’un hongrois, written in 1764. The ‘letter’ consists of verses by Baron Lo˝rinc Orczy, a general, and by his younger fellow-officer, Jańos Fekete, son of the Chief Justice, Gyo¨rgy Fekete, who was a leading bureaucrat and neo-aristocrat. A jeu d’esprit by two enlightened Francophiles, the text upbraids Voltaire for ignoring Hungary in his work, and points significantly to the army and military virtues as the chief factors which not only sustain Maria Theresa’s rule, but help to spread civilization there and elsewhere.37 Of course, the army was also a liability. It could not bear the full weight of the centralizing programme. Neither did it remain entirely immune from conflicting interpretations of patriotism. In 1790 several Hungarian officers would present a petition calling for national regiments to be stationed on national soil and employ the national, Magyar language: they were led by the son of Festetics, and their sentiments echoed the demands of the political opposition for which Jańos Fekete had now become a chief spokesman.38 Moreover, it was mainly the rising cost of the army which lay at the root of the unresolved constitutional impasse over state taxation and the related issues of tariff policy and the peasant question, The subject needs a serious treatment; a few suggestions below, p. 43. The best-known figures among the Bodyguard-literati are Bessenyei, Ba´roćzi, and Barcsay. Convenient summaries of their activities in A magyar irodalom to¨rteńete, ed. I. So˝te´r (6 vols., Bp., 1964–6), iii. 22–53; Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 301 ff., 647 ff.; Istvań Fried and Lajos Ne´medi in Maria Theresia, ed. Mraz, 355–85. 37 This Lettre remained unpublished, until edited by I. Vo ¨ ro¨s (Bp., 1987). On Fekete, see Gyo˝zo˝ Morvay, Galańthai gro´f Fekete Jańos (Bp., 1903). 38 Henrik Marczali, Az 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s (2 vols., Bp., 1907), ii. 82 ff.; Morvay, Fekete Jańos, 141 ff. 35 36

32


and which thus led to regular deadlock at the diet in 1741, 1751, and 1764–5. This represented a crucial problem in the long run, as any student of the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire will be aware; yet it was one which could remain latent for extended periods. The fragility of material and cultural solutions reached on other fronts, with the Hungarian nation underpaying and under-represented at the same time, could, in other words, always be dramatized as a dispute over the army; but that was not because military aims as such formed the highest priority of absolutist government, or because those aims—as yet, at least—stood at variance with the perceived political priorities which the Hungarian nation set itself.

I hope I have said enough to imply the essential patriotism of Hungary’s royal servants under Maria Theresa, however much it might be combined with personal ambition or chicanery. With very few exceptions they counselled respect for national traditions and liberties, albeit in different ways: the defensive Esterha´zy, the empire-building Grassalkovich, the clandestine Festetics, the suave and adroit Cardinal Batthyańy, the shrewd but ostentatious Brukenthal in Transylvania. (Balassa’s often provocatively unconstitutional opinions perhaps prove the rule, but he appears exceptional in other respects too, as a cross between the extremely unscrupulous careerist and the indefatigable do-gooder.) In their private lives they were supporters of national causes, such as schools, colleges, or collections, sometimes with public access, although the full development of that came in the next generation (Brukenthal already bequeathed his uniquely valuable museum for the purpose). This was not, of course, the xenophobic patriotism of the county gentry, the greatest obstacle to fuller Habsburg control over the country. Yet in some ways foreign contacts might heighten elements of national awareness. The active pursuit of change, through the only channels actually capable of promoting it, required both Hungarian (or in Brukenthal’s case Transylvanian) patriotism and solid Austrian loyalty as overlapping, even complementary, sentiments. The belated reform movement engineered by members of the domestic political nation in Hungary under the auspices of Maria Theresa reached its climax in the last years of her reign. They were encouraged by the reintegration of the rich plainlands of the Banat; by the acquisition of Fiume, a window on the west and training-ground for a rising generation of entrepreneurs, or at least of enterprising administrators; by the transfer of the country’s one university from an isolated provincial town to the historic metropolis of Buda.39 Such fruitful cooperation expunged for many contemporaries the memory of earlier squabbles. Maria Theresa herself declared, in connection with her decision on the 39 Fiume: Alada ´r Fest in Sz. 50 (1916), 239–66; E´va H. Bala´zs in ‘Sorsotok elo˝re ne´zze´tek’: a francia felvila´gosoda´s és a magyar kultu´ra, ed. B. Ko¨peczi and L. Sziklay (Bp., 1975), 145–61. University: Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 499 ff.


33

Banat: ‘I am a good Hungarian. My heart is full of gratefulness (Erkenntlichkeit) towards this nation.’ There was correspondingly widespread and genuine regret at her death, and the afterglow of that mood illumines the pages of nineteenthcentury historians like Maila´th, Horva´th, and Marczali. The first of these, Maila´th, who could still draw on personal reminiscence (his father was the first Governor of Fiume), concluded that ‘in Hungary too the constitution would have slumbered and the principle of absolute monarchy triumphed, if only the Empress had lived longer’.40 The judgement may be exaggerated; but the endemic oppositional spirit within the body politic had rarely appeared feebler. Loyalists looked to the 1780s to continue the momentum. Signs of admiration for the new ruler Joseph II are plentiful. Young Festetics writes to his father in late 1781 about ‘the wise Ordinances of our Philosophical and Enlightened Monarch’. Count Sa´muel Teleki, a Calvinist admittedly, but before the Patent of Toleration, writes to his wife that he ‘cannot praise enough the qualities of His Highness: we are proud to have him as our ruler’; by 1783, after the Patent, ‘just to look at him gives me consolation’.41 Joseph’s early moves could foster illusions further: he actually cut the Gordian knot over Transylvania, uniting its administration to that of Hungary proper; he centralized the officials of the Lieutenancy Council and the Chamber in Buda. His first anticlerical measures could count on considerable support; so could the Toleration Patent, and not merely among Protestants, long the most discontented party in the kingdom, for whom it opened up the prospect of office and a part in the national mission, as well as pecuniary and social advantage. One of its first beneficiaries was Teleki who, back in 1770, though a well-endowed magnate in Transylvania, had sought the ear of a court protector to release him from ‘the sad necessity of languishing in the shameful inactivity of an obscure and miserable life’.42 His words, however inflated by rhetoric, reveal much about the motivation of the kind of enlightened administrators we have been examining. From 1784–5 disenchantment was all the greater. Alienation from Joseph’s system, and its consequent collapse, were all the more rapid. The Emperor’s tearaway assault on the whole Hungarian constitution and nation seems to have been compounded of three factors. The first was his intemperate personality, which inherited Maria Theresa’s abruptness and insistency without her charm, or caution, or favours. Secondly, Joseph embodied the ‘Austrian’ prejudice 40 Maria Theresa quoted from Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, x. 128. Johann Maila ´th, Geschichte des o¨streichischen Kaiserstaates, vol. v (Hamburg, 1850), quoted at 86; Miha´ly Horva´th, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme, vol. vii (2nd edn., Bp., 1873); Henrik Marczali, Ma´ria Tere´zia (Bp., 1891). A further example, from 1826: Ferenc Kazinczy, Mu˝vei, ed. M. Szauder (2 vols., Bp., 1979), ii. 648. 41 OL P 245 24: letter from Gyo ¨ rgy Festetics, 20 July 1781. Teleki: OL P 661 45, nos. 2256, 2398. 42 Teleki quoted from OL P 661 45, no. 2200. On Joseph and Hungary in general, see Henrik Marczali, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete II. Jo´zsef kora´ban (3 vols., Bp., 1885–8); Ma´lyusz, Tu¨relmi rendelet, i. 141 ff.; Lajos Hajdu, II. Jo´zsef igazgata´si reformjai Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1982).

34


against Hungary in its most drastic form. Finally, and most importantly in the present context, he appears to have worked off a frustration at the country’s protected status under his mother: his role there had raised political problems and—even though he was proclaimed co-regent in Hungary as elsewhere (with a formula drafted by Festetics)—left him largely impotent right up until 1780 in the territory where Maria Theresa least trusted his judgement. Thus he could nurse ever fiercer resentment at the myriad trammels on royal authority within the crown of St Stephen.43 However we weigh those factors, the chaos by Joseph’s death in 1790 was correspondingly most complete in Hungary. And the failure of ‘Josephinism’ there manifests a deeper truth. Historians’ terminology has obscured the fact that the bureaucratic reform movement, conventionally described nowadays as ‘Josephinist’, in Hungary actually almost always stood closer to a ‘MariaTheresanism’. The mentality of the leading Hungarian Aufkla¨rer, like that of their Queen, was French in fashion but not in philosophy, and little affected by advanced criticism either of the church (the country bred hardly any Jansenists) or of society (hardly any non-nobles were involved at this stage). It was highly resistant to the claims of German national culture, which Joseph actively fostered, however involuntarily, not least by his theatrical enterprises; and it remained highly ambivalent about the unnecessary use of an army whose Hungarian component, while increasingly important, was still comparatively modest. Above all, it looked to progress by means of the creative moulding of tradition, especially via a careful extension of the royal prerogative. If Maria Theresa was ‘an active feudal monarch’, to cite P. G. M. Dickson’s sagacious assessment,44 Batthyańys, Esterha´zys, and Festeticses represented the vanguard of a kind of patriotic feudal ralliement. In the end Hungary and Austria did not grow together, as they and Maria Theresa had hoped. For that reason historians have largely failed, besides their vague plaudits, to investigate the nature of the symbiosis in her reign, especially in its prominent personalities, before Joseph II almost laid it waste again, and exposed it to a backlash from both sides during the years after 1789. The Queen’s enactments were saved, with the return under Leopold II to the status quo ante; and some of the earlier impetus could be recovered, frequently through later generations of families which had risen to official and social eminence under Maria Theresa.45 But the amphibious Austro-Hungarian patriotism of her day could not be saved. Most fatefully for the future, the linguistic nationalism which 43 Beales, Joseph II, esp. 100–2, 181 f., 339, 484, implies this, but without dwelling on the nature of Joseph’s attitude to Hungary before his accession there. For Festetics’s view of the co-regency see OL P 245 11, fasc. 12, fos. 12–19; cf. Beales, Joseph II, 135–7, on the general issue. See now also Antal Szańtay, Regionalpolitik im alten Europa: Die Verwaltungsreformen Josephs II. in Ungarn, in der Lombardei und in den o¨sterreichischen Niederlanden, 1785–90 (Bp., 2005), 56–105, 216–60. 44 Dickson, Finance and Government, esp. i. 207 ff., 325–9 (quotation at 325). 45 For later developments on this front, see below, pp. 177ff.


35

progressively succeeded it, while opening up membership of the nation to the population as a whole, at least to the Magyar part of the population, would also cut Hungarians off from any positive identification with the rest of the Monarchy. That outcome, as a later chapter will indicate, forms part of a larger evolution among the peoples of the Habsburg realms during the age of absolutism.

3 The Origins of Enlightenment in the Habsburg Lands Two different kinds of movement have conventionally been identified with the Enlightenment in Habsburg Central Europe: the officially sponsored reform programme under Maria Theresa and Joseph II, and the campaigns for cultural renewal among the nations of the region. This essay tries to bring both together by investigating their common genesis. The first half of the eighteenth century already witnessed the beginnings of Enlightenment across the Monarchy, in the form of reaction against the prevalent forms and ideas of the Baroque; but just as the latter had never been monolithic, so its challengers were correspondingly diverse. Alongside external influences, often associated with immigrants and travellers, much of the critique drew on alternative traditions within the Habsburg lands themselves, and stress is laid here on the notion of a CounterCounter-Reformation, which returned to earlier humanist and Protestant values, even though many of its carriers continued to be Catholic priests.

The notion of a specific Enlightenment, or Aufkla¨rung, on the territories of the Habsburg Monarchy in the later eighteenth century has become firmly established in recent decades, thanks to a whole series of perceptive and instructive studies, beginning with Winter and Valjavec.1 But the phenomenon remains hard to define. ‘Enlightenment’ tends to be used in conjunction with two other concepts which are more specific. On the one hand it relates to the state reform programme which after a few earlier intimations took off in Austria from the 1760s onward and culminated in the hectic decade of Joseph II’s rule, whence its conventional designation as ‘Joseph(in)ism’. On the other hand we have aspirations to cultural renewal, which set in at much the same time and later issued in explicitly national movements. This state of affairs calls for two comments. First, both points of departure are somewhat teleological. They consider rather the result than the genesis of ¨ ber die Urspru¨nge der Aufkla¨rung in den habsburgischen La¨ndern’, Das Originally published as ‘U ¨ sterreich], 2 (1985), 9–31. Achtzehnte Jahrhundert [und O 1 Eduard Winter, Der Josefinismus und seine Geschichte (Bru ¨ nn, 1943), revised as Der Josefinismus (Berlin, 1962); id., Fru¨haufkla¨rung (Berlin, 1966). Fritz Valjavec, Der Josephinismus (2nd edn, Mun., 1945), id., Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu Su¨dosteuropa (5 vols., Mun., 1953–70), iii, esp. 40 ff.; id., Geschichte der abendla¨ndischen Aufkla¨rung (V./Mun., 1961).

The Origins of Enlightenment

37

enlightened ideas: the ways in which they were harnessed for other purposes. Secondly, the two areas of study have been treated largely independently. Whereas Josephinism as a body of thought has been viewed in a Vienna-centred way, embracing the Austrian state as an undifferentiated whole, historians with national preoccupations usually proceeded on a centrifugal and provincial basis. Whereas the literature on Josephinism concentrated on political themes, scholars in the national mould have stressed linguistic and literary matters.2 The following sketch of how intellectual change came about seeks to hold on to a pan-monarchical perspective, but also to indicate something of the nature of local diversity.

Famously the Aufkla¨rung took as its target a whole world-view, together with much of the social and political structure which underpinned it. But it would be a mistake to regard this assault as a concerted campaign, where reformist circles in the capital always took the lead. Just as the cultural accomplishments of the baroque were unmanageably multifarious, so the critique of them—despite common features—assumed the character of a congeries of manifold particular confrontations which, though they may have lacked any wider purpose, all contributed to the overall outcome. For that reason we must first look back to the time before Maria Theresa’s accession, since behind the triumphal and resplendent façade of that incomparable epoch there already lodged numerous frictions and unconformities, indeed downright contradictions.3 Precisely the intellectual and spiritual consolidation of the counter-reforming church caused traditional discords to be reinflamed, and its worldly power-base engendered antagonisms. Best known is opposition to the Jesuit order, which possessed vast financial resources, as well as a sometimes flexible moral code, and enjoyed a nearmonopoly position in education. At the heart of the system, an anti-Jesuit mood had already taken over for some years in the court of Joseph I.4 More important was a rising dissatisfaction among the secular faculties at the University of Vienna. From the 1720s jurists and physicians allied with mistrustful officials 2 Cf. the surveys by Paul P. Bernard, ‘Origins of Josephinism’, Colorado College Studies, 7 ¨ sterreich und Europa: Festschrift H. Hantsch (Graz, 1965), 203–19; (1964); Erich Zo¨llner, in O Helmut Reinalter, in Ro¨mische Historische Mitteilungen, 17 (1975), 213–26, 18 (1976), 283–307; Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 287–309. Also various contributions in the commemorative ¨ sterreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II., ed. K. Gutkas et al. (V., 1980), and O ¨ sterreich im vols., O Europa der Aufkla¨rung, ed. Plaschka and Klingenstein. Typical of the national approach: Walter Schamschula, Die Anfa¨nge der tschechischen Erneuerung und das deutsche Geistesleben (Mun., 1973). But signs of a broader base in Istvań Fried, ‘II. Jo´zsef, a jo´zefinista´k e´s a reformerek’, Az Orsza´gos Szećhenyi Ko¨nyvta´r E´vko¨nyve (1979), 563–91; Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 275 ff., 345 ff., and passim. See also below, ch. 8. 3 Overview in Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, esp. 311 ff. 4 Hans Kramer, Habsburg und Rom in den Jahren 1708–9 (Innsbruck, 1936); Bernard, ‘Origins ¨ sterreich und Europa, of Josephinism’; Heinrich Benedikt, ‘Der Josephinismus vor Joseph II’, in O 183–201; Friedrich von Rummel, Franz Ferdinand von Rummel (Mun., 1980).

38


to press for change.5 We are less well informed about action at the other Jesuit universities, but competition from rival orders among the Catholic clergy can be surmised with some confidence. A number of them—notably canons regular, Premonstratensians, and Austin friars—followed the rule attributed to St Augustine, whose distinctiveness was asserted during the post-Reformation period; and these tended from the mid-seventeenth century onwards to be more sceptical about neoscholastic theology, even a little Jansenist, in the loose sense of that controverted term. Examples range from the Irish Franciscans in Prague to the entourage of the rebel leader Ferenc Ra´koćzi in Hungary.6 Innovation in secondary schooling fell largely to the Piarist order, which was especially numerous in Moravia and Hungary. By the beginning of the eighteenth century Piarists had taken up in philosophy the position of so-called ‘modified Aristotelianism’; they taught much mathematics and applied physics (after all they had long since been much attracted to the doctrines of Galileo); they taught history and geography, and also law and politics up to a point. In the 1740s a process of rethinking was already under way among Piarists and others—reflected at least in manuscript literature—which to some extent anticipated the imminent dramatic attack on the powers and privileges of the Jesuits.7 But (as specialists today know, though there is still no adequate survey) individual Jesuits proved wholly equal to the demands of the times. Whereas the introduction of such things as university history courses at Graz and Innsbruck may have had little effect, the achievements of a Stepling or Tesańek in mathematics or of Maximilian Hell in astronomy command respect. Even in remote Nagyszombat/Trnava Hungarian Jesuits discovered a modified, ‘newer philosophy’ around the middle of the century.8 These Catholic spokesmen for more modern viewpoints drew readily upon foreign writers, strongly represented in the more enterprising monastic libraries, 5 Grete Klingenstein, ‘Vorstufen der theresianischen Studienreformen in der Regierungszeit ¨ G 76 (1968), 327–77. Cf. in general R. J. W. Evans, ‘Die Universita¨t im Karls VI.’, in MIO geistigen Milieu der habsburgischen La¨nder, 17.-18. Jahrhundert’, in Die Universita¨t in Alteuropa, ed. A. Patschowsky and H. Rabe (Konstanz, 1994), 183–204, at 192 ff. 6 On the Irish or ‘Hibernians’: Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 217, 221, 320, 326–8. On Ra´koćzi: Be´la Zolnai, A janzenista Ra´koćzi (Szeged, 1927). 7 Alexius Hora ńyi, Scriptores Piarum Scholarum liberalium artium magistri (2 vols., Buda, 1808–9), contains brief biographies of many learned members of the order from eighteenth-century Central Europe. See also Josef Haubelt, ‘Seminarium politicum a Gelasius Dobner’, CˇCˇH, 27 (1979), 76–110. Cf. also Augustinus K. Huber, ‘Das Stift Tepl im Aufkla¨rungszeitalter’, Analecta Praemonstratensia, 26 (1950), 41–66; 27 (1951), 28–50; 28 (1952), 16–45; 29 (1953), 67–105; 30 (1954), 41–59; at 26, p. 58. 8 Csaba Csapodi, ‘Ke ´t vila´g hata´rań: fejezet a magyar felvila´goso´da´s to¨rteńete´bo˝l’, Sz. 79–80 (1945–6), 85–137; Jań Tibensky´, ‘Prı´spevok k dejina´m osvietenstva a jozefinizmu na Slovensku’, Historicke´ Sˇtu´die, 14 (1969), 98–114. On Jesuit historiography: Emil C. Scherer, Geschichte und Kirchengeschichte an den deutschen Universita¨ten (Freiburg i.B., 1927); Walter Ho¨flechner, Das Fach Geschichte an der Universita¨t Graz, 1729–1848 (Graz, 1975); Notker Hammerstein, Aufkla¨rung und katholisches Reich: Untersuchung zur Universita¨tsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reiches deutscher Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1977). Paul Shore, The Eagle and the Cross: Jesuits in Late Baroque Prague (St Louis, 2002).


39

as well as upon personal experiences abroad, even in Rome (which furnished an interesting chapter in the intellectual history of the Hungarian Piarists), but also in northern Europe: the famous Wenzel Anton Kaunitz and his fellow aristocratic reformer Rudolf Chotek were only two of numerous members of the Austrian elite to study there.9 Yet the attachment to foreign influences is more distinct still among Protestants. Even the illegal and clandestine Geheimprotestanten of the supposedly dependable Austrian archduchies, who recurrently re-emerged just when the victory of the Counter-Reformation seemed at last to have been won—and fresh efforts were made to convert or expel them in the 1730s and 1740s—had demonstrable foreign links. All the more so did heretics in north-east Bohemia and parts of Moravia, who had displayed enhanced confidence since the encouraging Swedish-imposed terms of the peace of Altransta¨dt, with the help of its direct beneficiaries, the Lutheran communities in Silesia.10 In Hungary the survival of a Protestantism which, if intimidated, had not been isolated, was naturally far more important. From their prime in the previous century the Calvinists salvaged a living culture of somewhat puritanical stamp, into which had penetrated certain precepts of Descartes and Bacon, as well as more recent theological controversies from the Netherlands. After 1700 the Lutherans, whose ministers were sent for training at Halle, Jena, and Wittenberg, experienced a movement of pietistic awakening, which embraced not only the Saxons of Transylvania and the Zips, but also the Slovaks and Magyars in the north of the country.11 Such currents were not necessarily progressive, or tokens of an early Enlightenment. As with Jansenism, they betrayed, particularly among the clergy, many signs of a renewal of essentially conservative positions. But they do witness, already before 1740, to a degree of open-mindedness, and to contacts between different 9 Gustav Otruba, ‘Kirche und Kultur in Aufkla ¨rung und Barock’, Jahrbuch fu¨r Landeskunde von Niedero¨sterreich, ns 31 (1953–4), 238–66 (libraries); Istvań Gerencse´r, A magyar felvila´gosoda´s és a kegyes iskola´k (Bp., 1943) (Piarists). Grete Klingenstein, Der Aufstieg des Hauses Kaunitz (Go¨ttingen, 1975), 112 ff.; cf. Jirˇ´ı Kroupa, ‘Mikulovske´ a evropske´ korˇeny josefinismu’, Studie Muzea Kromeˇˇr´ızˇska (1979), 59–69, for another Moravian example. Ivo Cerman, in CˇCˇH, 101 (2003), 818–52 (Chotek). 10 Hans von Zwiedineck-Su ¨ denhorst, ‘Geschichte der religio¨sen Bewegung in Innero¨sterreich im ¨ G, 53 (1875), 457–546; Rudolf Reinhardt, ‘Zur Kirchenreform in O ¨ sterreich 18. Jahrhundert’, AO unter Maria Theresia’, Zeitschrift fu¨r Kirchengeschichte, 77 (1966), 105–19; W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Camb., 1992), 54–115; Regina Po¨rtner, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria, 1580–1630 (Ox., 2001), 249 ff. For Bohemia: Antonıń Rezek, Deˇjiny prostona´rodnı´ho hnutı´ na´bozˇenske´ho v Cˇechaćh, vol. i (Pr., 1887), esp. 62 ff.; K.V. Ada´mek (ed.), Listiny k deˇjina´m lidove´ho hnutı´ na´bozˇenske´ho na ˇceske´m vyćhodeˇ (2 vols., Pr., 1911–24); V. Schulz (ed.), Lista´ˇr na´bozˇenske´ho hnutı´ poddane´ho lidu na panstvı´ litomysˇlske´m (Pr., 1915); Eduard Winter, Die Pflege der west- und su¨dslavischen Sprachen in Halle im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1954), 10–30, 87–131; Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux, in Le Livre religieux et ses pratiques, ed. H. C. Bo¨deker et al. (Go¨ttingen, 1991) 131–54; ead. in Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 54 (1999), 915–44. 11 On Hungarian Pietists: Hermann Jekeli, Quellen zur Geschichte des Pietismus in Siebenbu ¨ rgen (Medias¸, 1922); Be´la Szent-Ivańyi, ‘A pietizmus Magyarorsza´gon’, Sz. 69 (1935), 1–38, 157–80, ˇ urovicˇ, ‘Slovensky´ pietizmus’, Historica Slovaca, iii–iv (1945–6), 165–201. 321–33, 414–27; Jań D For Calvinists, see n. 13 below; and cf., for the Dutch connection, Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Ox., 1995), 900–2.

40


linguistic, confessional, and ethnic communities: as with the group around Matthias Bel in Pressburg or the international correspondents of the Transylvanian scholar, Sa´muel Ko¨lese´ri (1663–1732).12 Thus they constitute a preliminary stage of the broader development at a pan-monarchical level, to which their own contribution was not insignificant. Consider a few examples from the eastern marches of the Hungarian lands. Despite official restrictions, students from thence in this period consolidated their customary connections to Holland and Switzerland, as the letters written to one of their high-born Calvinist patrons, Count Sańdor Teleki, indicate. In Germany too they were abundant: they soon discovered the new universities at Halle and then Go¨ttingen, and the older ties to England did not entirely dissipate. In the 1750s a young son of Debrecen, the later polymath Istvań Weszpre´mi, pursued path-breaking medical research there.13 Against that, Maria Theresa was expressing a proto-Josephinist official stance when she shortly afterwards dismissed the proposal for a professorship of English language and literature in Austria ‘because of the danger of this tongue as a carrier of principles deleterious to religion and morals’.14 After the peace of Szatma´r the range of such encounters was no longer restricted to the lands of St Stephen, even if the question of Austrian attitudes to Hungarian heterodoxy has as yet hardly been examined. Thus the intellectual leader of the Transylvanian Saxons, Samuel Brukenthal, whose highly civilized and cosmopolitan tastes emerge strongly from Schuller’s monumental biography, functioned as a bridge between Lutheran Hermannstadt and the highest circles in Maria Theresa’s Vienna. His compatriot Ignaz von Born was stimulated by experience of his native mining district to the notable scientific activities that he transferred from 1770 to the sessions of the ‘Privatgesellschaft’, or quasi-academy which he founded in Prague.15 Sa´muel Teleki, son of Sańdor just mentioned and favourite of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, constituted with his nephew (but contemporary) Jo´zsef a stellar bibliophile duo (rather like the brothers Załuski during the Polish Enlightenment). His book collection, originally housed in Vienna, subsequently became, alongside Brukenthal’s holdings, the greatest library in Transylvania.16 12 Jean [Ja ń] Oberucˇ, Matthieu Bel, un pie´tiste en Slovaquie au 18e sie`cle; Zsigmond Jako´, ‘Beitra¨ge zu den Beziehungen des ruma¨nischen kulturellen Lebens mit der deutschen Fru¨haufkla¨rung’, Revue Roumaine d’Histoire, 8 (1969), 673–86 (Ko¨lese´ri). 13 G. Hoffmann (ed.), Peregrinuslevelek, 1711–50: Ku ¨ lfo¨ldo¨n tanulo´ dia´kok levelei Teleki Sańdornak (Szeged, 1980). On Weszpre´mi: R. J. W. Evans in Bodleian Library Record, 9, no. 6 (1978), 344 and n. For semi-progressive tendencies in the Hungarian Reformed church: Imre Re´ve´sz, Sinai Miklo´s és kora (Bp., 1959); Tama´s Esze in A Heidelbergi Ka´te´ to¨rteńete Magyarorsza´gon, ed. T. Bartha (Bp., 1965), 169–203; Vilmos Gyenis on Jo´zsef Hermańyi Dienes in ‘Sorsotok elo˝re ne´zze´tek’, ed. Ko¨peczi and Sziklay, 79–106. 14 Rudolf Kink, Geschichte der kaiserlichen Universita ¨ t zu Wien, vol. i (V., 1854), 516. Cf. Albert ¨ sterreich unter Karl VI. Ja¨ger, ‘Das Eindringen des modernen kirchenfeindlichen Zeitgeistes in O und Maria Theresia’, Zeitschrift fu¨r katholische Theologie, 2 (1878), 259–311, 417–72, at 277. 15 Schuller, Brukenthal, esp. ii. 228 ff. Josef Haubelt, Studie o Igna ´ ci Bornovi (Pr., 1972), esp. 15 ff. 16 A. De é Nagy (ed.), Teleki Sa´muel és a Teleki-te´ka (Buch., 1976); Do´ra F. Csanak, Ke´t korszak hata´rań: Teleki Jo´zsef (Bp., 1983), very comprehensive.


41

But let us return to our starting point in the first years after 1700. The most celebrated dissentient thinkers in the Habsburg Monarchy of the early eighteenth century were certainly the free spirits who belonged to the entourage of Prince Eugene and certain other cultivated aristocrats. Most of them had been invited in from abroad: Frenchmen, Italians, a few Germans. The well-known names among them—Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and Montesquieu, Leibniz and Pietro Giannone—should not seduce us into exaggerating the effects of their time in Austria. It was often a matter of libertinisme érudit, with a fair helping of affectation and self-indulgence, on the part of relatively short-term visitors, who remained distant from the indigenous world of ideas. A fine biography of the self-willed Bohemian grandee, Franz Anton Sporck, persuasively lays stress rather on his baroque than on his libertarian traits.17 Yet such cases do point up the important cultural role of real immigrants, who were attracted in increasing numbers by the new opportunities available in and around the expanding Austrian state apparatus. Many came from Protestant countries; frequently their contribution was so indispensable that they could remain Protestant. I am thinking in the first place of the bureaucracy itself. We know about Johann Christoph Bartenstein, son of a professor in Strasbourg, who had enjoyed a thorough Lutheran academic training before he became a trusted counsellor to Charles VI and then especially to Maria Theresa.18 But there must have been countless lesser newcomers in the widening ranks of the administration, each of whom brought with him a small piece from another sphere. The south-German poet, painter and scholar Franz Christoph von Scheyb (1704–77), for example, had studied in Leiden and Rome before taking up the post of secretary to the Lower Austrian estates. The Rhinelander Johann Christoph von Jordan (died 1748) operated as a senior official in the Bohemian Court Chancellery and as a renowned antiquary. Theodor Anton Taulow von Rosenthal (1702–79), a native of Hildesheim, concluded his career as Haus- und Hofarchivar in Vienna. One of the luminaries of the next generation, Friedrich Wilhelm von Taube (1728–78) had begun life in London—and with the surname of ‘Dove’.19 17 Pavel Preiss, Boje s dvouhlavou sanı ´: Frantisˇek Antonıń Sporck a baroknı´ kultura v Cˇechaćh (2nd edn, Pr., 2003). For earlier literature on this question, see Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 216, 326–7, and esp. Max Braubach, Geschichte und Abenteuer: Gestalten um den Prinzen Eugen (Mun., 1950), 354 ff. 18 Max Braubach, ‘Johann Christoph Bartensteins Herkunft und Anfa ¨ G 61 (1953), ¨nge’, MIO 99–149. 19 For such personalities Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, remains a still under-exploited mine ¨ sterreich (2 vols., V., 1776–8); of information; see also the incomplete Ignaz de Luca, Das gelehrte O and the studies in institutional history by Gross, Geschichte der deutschen Reichshofkanzlei, and Oswald von Gschliesser, Der Reichshofrat, 1559–1806 (V., 1942). For Scheyb, see also Justus Schmidt, ‘Voltaire und Maria Theresia: Franzo¨sische Kultur des Barock in ihren Beziehungen zu Osterreich’, Mitteilungen des Vereins fur Geschichte der Stadt Wien 11 (1931), 73–115, at 100–4; Gerhard Winner, Die Klosteraufhebungen in Niedero¨sterreich und Wien (V./Mun., 1967), 49 f.; Elisabeth Garms-Cornides, ‘Zwischen Giannone, Muratori und Metastasio: Die Italiener im geistigen Leben Wiens’, Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, 3 (1976), 224–50. For

42


From the free professions a similar list could no doubt be assembled, though the Irish physicians in Bohemia are among the rare beneficiaries of an existing investigation.20 We have better information about commercial contacts. Here there existed unique chances for clever foreigners who, if not highly educated, were at least differently educated from those with whom they did business in the Monarchy. The (second) Oriental Trading Company, founded by Charles VI, was almost wholly in the hands of immigrants, whether as managers or as skilled workers in their manufactories; likewise the trade routes through Trieste. Spokesmen for the Catholic church were hardly charmed by this state of affairs.21 Bohemia received all manner of individual entrepreneurs, such as the English Allasons, who founded a significant linen business at Rumburg in 1713. Hungary was the destination for mining technicians like Georg Ernst Multz from Joachimsthal, Georg Zacharias Angerstein, a Swede from Hanover, or another Englishman, the steam-engine expert (and drunkard) Isaac Potter.22 Viennese bankers were mainly Swiss Calvinists. Many Viennese booksellers were German Lutherans, since they could more easily acquire the new foreign literature, including specialist work, which was theoretically proscribed but in practice silently tolerated.23 It was surely not by chance that one of the first modern historians of Bohemia, Voigt, came from Oberleutensdorf, where the largest manufactory in the land was located; or that the Josephinist reformer-abbot Stephan Rautenstrauch grew up as the son of a well-to-do artisan in the north of the country. Such examples could be multiplied at will. That is not, however, to say that the relation between Aufkla¨rung and industrial or other economic development can be grasped in simplistic Marxist categories (even if one of the pioneers in our field, Eduard Winter, played along with such views24). It is far more a question of mutual Jordan: Schamschula, Anfa¨nge, 78–81. For Taulow: ibid. 65–9; L. Bittner et al. (ed.), Gesamtinventar des Wiener Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchivs, vol. i (V.,1936), 117–23. For Taube: Luca, Das ¨ sterreich, ii. 209–20. gelehrte O 20 Ludvı ´k Schmid, Irsˇtı´ le´karˇi v Cˇechaćh (Pr., 1968). 21 Ja ¨ger, ‘Eindringen’, 259 ff. On Trieste: Charles H. O’Brien, Ideas of Religious Toleration at the Time of Joseph II (Philadelphia, 1969), esp. 12, 19 f., and now esp. Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste: Absolutist Politics and Enlightenment Culture (Stanford, Cal., 1999). 22 Arnos ˇt Klı´ma, Manufakturnı´ obdobı´ v Cˇechaćh (Pr., 1955), 143 ff. (Allasons). For Hungary, see various articles by Jozef Voza´r, in Studia Historica Slovaca, 7 (1974), 102–40; Acta Historiae Rerum Naturalium necnon Technicarum, 7 (1974), 52–80; ibid. 16 (1981), 61–86; Hospoda´ˇrske´ Deˇjiny, 7 (1981), 145–72; summarized in id., ‘Der Bergbau in der Slowakei wa¨hrend der Regierungszeit Maria Theresias’, in Maria Theresia als Ko¨nigin von Ungarn, 96–105. 23 Hanns L. Mikoletzky, ‘Schweizer Ha ¨ sterreich’, in O ¨ sterreich und ¨ndler und Bankiers in O Europa, 149–81 (bankers); Ja¨ger, ‘Eindringen’ (Lutherans). Cf., in general, Theodor Wiedemann, ¨ G 50 (1873), 287 ff.; Grete Klingen‘Die kirchliche Bu¨cher-Censur in der Erzdio¨cese Wien’, AO stein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autorita¨t im 18. Jahrhundert (V., 1970), 131 ff. 24 Winter, Josefinismus (1962 edn.), 361: ‘Josephinism is not only the ideology of so-called enlightened absolutism, but also in high degree the expression of the emergence of the bourgeois nation in Austria’; id., Fru¨haufk1a¨rung, 107 ff. Cf. the suggestive formulation of Josef Haubelt in Veˇstnı´k Cˇeskoslovenske´ Akademie Veˇd, 78 (1969), 571 f.; and in general, id., Cˇeske´ osvıćenstvı´ (Pr., 1986).


43

connections, such as developed particularly clearly in the upper Hungarian mining region. At Schemnitz in the middle of the 1730s a school of mines was opened which achieved the rank of academy in 1763 and enjoyed a greater European reputation than any other Habsburg cultural institution. Here metallurgical technology very fruitfully complemented pure science, and the professors—the Tyrolean Scopoli and his fellow-countryman the unconventional Jesuit Nikolaus Poda, the north-Bohemian Peithner, the Dutcheducated Frenchman Jacquin, the Thuringian Christoph Traugott Delius and others—formed a much-travelled and cosmopolitan (but seriously underresearched) fraternity with personal and epistolary contacts to many colleagues of like mind within and beyond the frontiers of the Monarchy.25 There were also many foreigners in the Austrian army, such as the Frenchman Balthasar Hacquet, who later worked as doctor and geologist in Ljubljana and Lwo´w and distinguished himself as an indefatigable travel writer. Yet the army, whose public significance grew mightily in these years, suits rather to illustrate a contrary tendency. Military service, whether in the manifold Habsburg garrison towns or in theatres of war abroad, stretched the intellectual horizons of many. Joseph von Sonnenfels (whose father, a native of Berlin, was incidentally one of the first important modern Jewish immigrants into the Monarchy) spent six years in this fashion across Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. The father and father-in-law of his friend Born were professional officers as well as economic entrepreneurs. The enthusiastic Josephinist pedagogue, scientist, and Slav patriot Franz Joseph Kinsky remained a soldier throughout his life; the first chair of Czech was established under his patronage at the Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt.26 The contemporary Hungarian historian Kovachich was correct up to a point when he attributed the Enlightenment in his homeland to the experiences of the Seven Years War;27 however, he seems to set his terminus a quo too late. The resultant founding of a Hungarian bodyguard by Maria Theresa may be seen as an attempt to forestall any possible oppositional movement of a west-European kind in that country. But it resulted in a display of patriotic objectives within this elite corps which almost anticipated the later goals of the Decembrists in Russia. If we seek, albeit in the highly cursory and sketchy fashion suggested here, to conceive of the early Aufkla¨rung in the Habsburg Monarchy as a series of personal linkages, it reveals itself to be a confluence of sundry different channels of intellectual renewal. We can measure that phenomenon by reference to one important shared landmark, the genesis of the first learned society in our 25 Good summary by Josef Vlachovic ˇ et al. in Z Deˇjin Vied a Techniky na Slovensku, 3 (1964), esp. 33–95; an English version in Studia Historica Slovaca, 2 (1964), 103–39. 26 Franz Kopetzky, Josef und Franz von Sonnenfels (V., 1882), 6 ff. On Kinsky: Josef Hanus ˇ, Na´rodnı´ Museum a nasˇe obrozenı´, vol. i (Pr., 1921), 91–107; Haubelt in Veˇstnı´k, 560–77; and cf. above, p. 31. 27 Margaret C. Ives, Enlightenment and National Revival: Patterns of Interplay and Paradox in Late Eighteenth-Century Hungary (L., 1979), 14.

44


territories, the short-lived Societas Incognitorum Litteratorum, which operated at Olomouc between 1745 and 1752. This first modern scholarly institution has been discussed repeatedly, especially from the standpoint of Bohemian national culture; at times its achievements have been somewhat exaggerated. For our purposes it suffices to point to its composition: numerous members of religious orders, with the exception of the Jesuits, joined it; so did Protestants from neighbouring parts of Germany and Hungary, and officials like Peter Jordan and Taulow von Rosenthal; while its chief organizer was Baron Petrasch, a retired military man, who would shortly make friends with the young Sonnenfels.28

Let us turn now to consider some of the forms which this proto-Enlightenment took. As has already been intimated, it expressed itself rather in postures of rejection than in innovation. It is a commonplace of recent research that discontent was directed against ‘baroque Catholicism’. Indeed, it attacked precisely those features of the prevailing system of thought which the Counter-Reformation, in its assault on Protestant heresy, had extolled: the cult of saints, Marian worship, the conspicuous practice of good works, mysticism and abnegation of the world, symbolic forms and imagery. The attempt was made— whether consciously or unconsciously—to counteract a wrong turning in the spiritual and cultural life of the Habsburg lands. From this dialectical presupposition flow consequences which have been pondered much less often, particularly in the context of the Monarchy as a whole. For if we identify early Enlightenment to some extent with Counter-Counter-Reformation, then several of its concerns turn out to involve a reversion to the prime aspirations of the age which had preceded the reimposition of Catholicism in Central Europe, that is to say the sixteenth century and in part even the fifteenth. One of those concerns was toleration, especially in the religious sphere: a notion conceived not as the fruit of indifference, but—and this became normal among Josephinists—as reconciliation on the basis of free private worship (exercitium privatum), the principle subsequently enshrined in the Patents of 1781–2 and asserted by some (only) in a fully eirenical spirit.29 A certain number of reformist Catholics reached this conclusion because they were converts: thus Bartenstein; or Tobias von Gebler, who had studied at Jena, Go¨ttingen, and 28 Hanus ˇ, Na´rodnı´ Museum, 38 ff.; Ludwig Hammermayer, ‘Die Benediktiner und die Akademiebewegung im katholischen Deutschland’, Studien und Mitteilungen aus dem Benediktinerund Cisterzienserorden, 70 (1959), 55 ff.; Beda F. Menzel, Abt Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch von Brˇevnov-Braunau (Ko¨nigstein i. Ts., 1969), 76–88; Schamschula, Anfa¨nge, 34 ff.; A. S. Myl’nikov, Vznik na´rodneˇ osvıćenske´ ideologie v ˇceskyćh zemıćh 18. stoletı´ (Pr., 1974), 133 ff.; Antonıń Kostlań, Societas incognitorum: prvnı´ ucˇena´ spolecˇnost v ˇceskyćh zemıćh (Pr., 1996). 29 O’Brien, Ideas of Religious Toleration, 17 ff.; Grete Klingenstein, ‘Modes of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in 18th-Century Habsburg Politics’, AHY, 24 (1993), 1–16, makes the best case for the regime’s goodwill. Josef Karniel, Die Toleranzpolitik Kaiser Josephs II. (Gerlingen, 1986), stresses rather the foreign-political concerns behind this policy. Things were naturally somewhat different in Hungary. See the fundamental account by Ma´lyusz, A tu¨relmi rendelet, vol. i.


45

Halle; or Karl von Zinzendorf, nephew of the founder of the Herrnhuter, who had grown up in Saxony. Others reflected on their experience with the remnants of the indigenous Protestant population. Johann Leopold Hay, Sonnenfels’s brother-in-law and later bishop of Hradec Kra´love´, headed a commission to investigate the Moravian sectarians who surfaced again in the late 1770s; its recommendations exercised considerable influence over the new legislation. Hay became convinced that these deluded souls (who in fact found support from Silesia and Hungary, and had often served in the army) could be won back for the old church only by persuasion and in an atmosphere of coexistence.30 The content and tone of Hay’s views, as expressed in his famous pastoral letter of 1781, are reminiscent of the religious pronouncements of Emperor Maximilian II a full two centuries earlier. The previous year Kaunitz himself, in a memorandum for Maria Theresa, had pointed to the conciliatory attitude of Lazarus von Schwendi, who was Maximilian’s adviser and also (be it noted) his military commander. Several other contemporaries likewise resurrected the example of Schwendi.31 Rautenstrauch and Sto¨ger, the leading figures in the campaign for new ‘general seminaries’, to replace the existing episcopal institutions for the training of clergy, recommended to their students long lists of the works of Protestant theologians, in particular the classics of the age of Reformation and the later promoters of confessional harmony or syncretism. Most striking is perhaps a short history of toleration which a Moravian cleric, Otto Steinbach von Kranichsfeld, published in 1785 in the proceedings of the Bohemian Privatgesellschaft. Steinbach lingers lovingly over the spokesmen for religious moderation in the national past, above all Maximilian II and the great tribune of the estates in his own province, Karel Zˇerotıń, before descending into the mutual excesses of the seventeenth century.32 The roots of these professions of tolerance in the mature Aufkla¨rung lay to some degree in Jansenism, which set the ethical principles of the Council of Trent high above its commitment to Rome and its counter-reforming edge, and which evinced a certain congruity with puritanical and pietistic notions in Hungary at that time. Count Sporck already bore witness to that, as he published 30 On Zinzendorf ’s beliefs, see his autobiography and early diaries: E. G. von Pettenegg (ed.), Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf (V., 1879), 165 ff.; Karl von Zinzendorf, Aus den Jugendtagebu¨chern: 1747, 1752 bis 1763, ed. H. Wagner et al. (V., 1997). On Hay’s activity: Frantisˇek Bedna´ˇr, Za´pas moravskyćh evangelı´ku˚ o na´bozˇenskou svobodu v letech 1777–81 (Pr., 1931); Winter, Josefinismus (1962 edn.), 167–76; Reinhold J. Wolny, Die josephinische Toleranz unter besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung ihres geistlichen Wegbereiters J. L. Hay (Mun., 1973). Cf. Arnosˇt [Ernest] Denis, Cˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ed. J. Vancˇura (3rd edn., 2 vols., Pr., 1921), iii. 185 f. (army). 31 Wolny, Toleranz, 23; cf. (e.g.) Magazin fur Geschichte, Statistik und Staatsrecht der o ¨sterreichischen Monarchie, vol. i (Go¨ttingen, 1806), 296. For Maximilian II and Schwendi, see Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 19 f. and literature cited there. 32 Menzel, Rautenstrauch, esp. 254 f.; cf. Josef Hanzal, in C ˇCˇH 93 (1995), 86–98. Elisabeth Kovaćs, Ultramontanismus und Staatskirchentum im theresianisch-josephinischen Staat (V., 1975), esp. 69–72 (Sto¨ger); O. Steinbach, ‘Versuch einer Geschichte der alten und neueren Toleranz im Ko¨nigreich Bo¨hmen und Markgrafthum Ma¨hren’, Abhandlungen der bo¨hmischcn Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften in Prag, 2 (1785), 200–33.

46


Protestant works, among them the treatise by a chaplain to William III on the reunification of the churches, alongside controversial Catholic devotional works, among them a letter of the eminent spirituale, Cardinal Pole, to Archbishop Cranmer. The influence of Muratori and other Italians also underpinned such notions in Austria.33 Yet Jansenists were not necessarily well disposed towards Protestants: they disapproved of the latter’s ecclesiastical organization and feared accusations of heresy. On the other hand, the development of ideas of toleration can be seen as well in an increasingly explicit association with Protestant traditions as such, especially in the Bohemian lands, where the Hussite movement had assumed distinctly national characteristics. There Franz Faustin Procha´zka and Fortunat Durich, drawing on Reformation models, elaborated a thorough, scholarly, and idiomatic new translation of the Bible into Czech. Their enterprise found an echo among the Slovenes, in a circle at Ljubljana around Bishop Herberstein and Canon Japelj. They too could refer back to valuable Lutheran texts from the sixteenth century in the vernacular. Kaspar Royko, a native Slovene settled in Bohemia, made so bold as to assert in his history of the Council of Constance that Jan Hus and his fellow-accused, Jerome of Prague, had been innocent when burned at the stake. Josef Dobrovsky´ attacked the orthodox position on clerical celibacy.34 In the 1780s others sought to inflame the controversy further: witness the notorious Specimen Monachologiae (a classification of monks according to the Linnaean system), which was frequently attributed to Born and consciously evoked the spirit of Ulrich von Hutten and the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum; or the comparisons of Joseph II to Luther which appeared in the pamphlet literature.35 Once more we must beware of exaggeration. Historical Hussitism was no gospel of peace; nor did it directly prepare the way for intellectual and political liberalism, even though a significant current in Czechoslovak culture, which culminated in (President) Masaryk, sought to validate such views, and not without some success.36 In Austria there were too few Protestants for similar notions to be seriously entertained. In Hungary there were too many to mollify 33 Preiss, Sporck, 72–103. E. Zlabinger, Lodovico Antonio Muratori und O ¨ sterreich (Innsbruck, 1970). 34 For an introduction to these Bohemian developments, see Jaroslav Vlc ˇek, Deˇjiny ˇceske´ literatury, vol. ii (Pr., 1940), 178 ff. Cf., most recently, Zdeneˇk V. David, in CˇCˇH 99 (2001), 486–518. Royko’s Geschichte der großen allgemeinen Kircherversammlung zu Kostnitz, 4 vols., appeared first at Graz, then in Prague 1785, also in a partial Czech translation. The equivalent Slovene movement seems not yet to have been scrutinized; but cf. Jozˇe Pogacˇnik, Bartholomaüs Kopitar: Leben und Werk (Mun., 1978), 131 ff; F. M. Dolinar, ‘Jozˇefinci med Rimom in Dunajem’, Acta Ecclesiastica Sloveniae, i (Ljubljana, 1979), 43–101. 35 ‘Joannes Physiophilus’, Specimen Monachologiae methodo Linnaeana, ran to several editions in 1783–4, mostly with false imprints; Haubelt, Studie, doubts Born’s authorship. On the comparison to Luther: Winter, Josefinismus (1962 edn.), 100; Elisabeth Kovaćs, ‘Neue Aspekte und ¨ sterreich], 1 (1983), Forschungen zur Reise Pius’ VI. nach Wien’, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert [und O 31–43, esp. 38. 36 J. Herben, Ota ´ zka na´bozˇenska´ v nasˇem probuzenı´ ((Pr., 1927), is suggestive, but tendentious; cf. Albert Prazˇa´k, Cˇeske´ obrozenı´ (Pr., 1948), 63–110.


47

the Catholics, and pietistic impulses in that country formed a kind of spiritual defence mechanism against encroachments from the dominant confession. In these circumstances it seems rather worth stressing a common denominator between moderate Catholics and moderate Protestants in the region: the renewed admiration on both sides for Renaissance humanism. This was partly a matter of receptivity to the neoclassical school of Go¨ttingen, whose teachings were transplanted to the Habsburg lands, notably to Hungary, by many students and professors.37 But a conscious return to domestic sources also took place. Procha´zka, for instance, did not stint in his praise for the sixteenth-century Latin literature of Bohemia, which was reckoned to have reached its climax at the court of Rudolf II; only to condemn with withering scorn the practitioners of that genre during the Counter-Reformation. The pioneering historical researches of the Piarist, Gelasius Dobner, were initially stimulated by the commission to render a crude popular chronicle of the Czech Renaissance into Latin (in the end his annotations filled six volumes). Dobner’s colleague Voigt took much trouble to edit humanist writings for the press; he particularly esteemed the neo-Latin poets, above all Bohuslav Hassenstein of Lobkowitz.38 Already in the middle of the 1740s the young natural scientist Joseph Stepling made his mark as a Latin versifier. In the foreword to the first volume of the proceedings of his Private Society, Ignaz von Born praised the ‘learned gatherings’ of Bohemian authors of yore. Dobrovsky´, the most illustrious figure in this world of Bohemian Enlightenment, was deeply marked by the sceptical, tolerant, ethical values of classicism (as Jaroslav Ludvı´kovsky´ already showed in a powerful analysis seventy years ago).39 In Hungary the same enthusiasm can be measured by a series of humanist re-editions which appeared between 1740 and 1790. These included the Renaissance historiographers: Bonfini (in three separate versions), Ransano, Istvańffi, Forgaćh, and others. The splendid Latin poetry of Janus Pannonius was published twice, once by a Piarist, then by a team under the direction of Sa´muel Teleki. Constantin von Khautz, nephew of Scheyb (whom we encountered earlier), and author in 1755 of the first attempt at a literary history of Austria, espoused similar priorities.40 And everywhere the epistolary genre, so favoured 37 Above all in the last generation of the eighteenth century: cf. I. Borzsa ´k, Budai E´zsaia´s és klasszika-filolo´giańk kezdetei (Bp., 1955), 27 ff. On Go¨ttingen influences in general: E´va H. Bala´zs, Berzeviczy Gergely a reformpolitikus (Bp., 1967), 8 ff.; C. Go¨llner and H. Staˇnescu (ed.), Aufkla¨rung: Schrifttum der Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen und Banater Schwaben (Buch., 1974). 38 F. F. Prochaska (sic), De Saecularibus Liberalium Artium in Bohemia et Moravia Fatis (Pr. 1782), esp. 307 ff. J. Haubelt, ‘Pocˇa´tky historiograficke´ praće Gelasia Dobnera’,CˇCˇH 22 (1974), 703–33; A. S. Myl’nikov, Epocha Prosveshcheniya v Cheshskych zemlyach (Moskow, 1977), 136 f. (Voigt). 39 Winter, Josefinismus (1962 edn.) 59 ff. (Stepling). Abhandlungen einer Privatgesellschaft in Bo¨hmen, ed. I. v. Born, i (1775), Preface. Jaroslav Ludvı´kovsky´, Dobrovske´ho klasicka´ humanita (Brat., 1933). 40 Hungarian titles in brief in A magyar irodalom to ¨rteńete, ed. So˝te´r, ii. 568 f. F. C. F. von Khautz, Versuch einer Geschichte der o¨sterreichischen Gelehrten (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1755); on Khautz, see Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v.

48


by the humanists, came into its own again. The Hungarians discovered the court culture and the correspondence of Matthias Corvinus; the Bohemians discovered the heritage of the magnanimous and cosmopolitan statesman, Karel Zˇerotıń. Remarkably, the Viennese even found some interest in the previously unregarded literary productivity of that negligent Renaissance ruler, Rudolf II. In 1771 a certain Count Bernardino de Pace marketed a stout collection of chancellery missives from the 1590s as a contribution to ‘the history of our time’.41 In reality they belong among the most tedious of all times. At one point the painstaking aristocrat (or his unnamed copyist) printed fifty identical letters of recommendation to different princes of the church one after another. This well-developed (even if somewhat unbalanced) historical perspective formed a crucial component of the Aufkla¨rung in the Monarchy. Thus it set itself sharply apart from the baroque, where history’s role had been largely ancillary to the Gesamtkunstwerk, or institutional totality, of the world of CounterReformation ideas. The transitional stage between the two lay around the middle of the century. Thereafter the new attitudes were manifest even among administrative Josephinists. Joseph II’s counsellors, if not the Emperor himself, took pains to justify their reforms by appeal to precedent. They adduced the medieval regalists, especially Marsilio, and appealed without inhibition to the teachings of Jean Bodin, to the constitutional arguments of the early seventeenth-century Calvinist, Melchior Goldast, or even to the Gallican writings of Bossuet (whom Sporck too had invoked).42 It could well be contended that such considerations had no less effect on the course of public policy, at least in respect of the relation between church and state, than did all the better-known west-European and north-German theories of natural law and rationality. In 1764, as we saw in the previous chapter, Maria Theresa’s court librarian and confidant, Adam Franz Kolla´r, issued a work on royal patronage rights in the Hungarian church which unleashed such a storm of protest that it had to be withdrawn. Yet his text consisted of a severely historical exegesis of the question, and the author (who had in fact already published a complementary study two years earlier without causing any stir) counted as an internationally recognized scholar and antiquarian. In Croatia Kolla´r’s like-minded friend Baltazar Krcˇelic´ pursued a parallel course.43 On the other hand, those whose enlightened convictions stood in contradiction to Joseph’s 41 Epistolae Matthiae Corvini, ed. I. Kelcz (4 vols., Kassa, 1743–4); I. Kaprinai (ed.), Hungaria diplomatica temporibus Matthiae de Hunyad (2 vols., V., 1767–71); Caroli L. B. Zierotin Epistolae selectae, ed. J. W. Monse, vol. i (Bru¨nn, 1781). Divi Rudolphi Imperatoris Epistolae ineditae, ed. B. de Pace (V., 1771). I have no information about Pace. 42 G. Holzknecht, Ursprung und Herkunft der Reformideen Kaiser Josefs II. auf kirchlichem Gebiet (Innsbruck, 1914), somewhat overstated (cf. H. Voltelini, ‘Die naturrechtlichen Lehren und die Reformen des 18. Jahrhunderts’, HZ 105 [1910], 65–104); I. W. Frank, ‘Zum spa¨tmittelalterlichen und josephinischen Kirchenversta¨ndnis’, in Katholische Aufkla¨rung und Josephinismus, ed. E. Kovaćs (Mun., 1979), 143–72. 43 On Kolla ´r, see above, ch. 2, nn. 17, 31; on Kerchelich/Kercselics, Krcˇelic´, see below, ch. 8, n. 33.


49

despotism after 1780 could take refuge in an analogous kind of historical argumentation. In this way both Hungarian Calvinists and Saxon Lutherans defended their case with extensive memoranda. Had not the Emperor himself, when he dissolved the Servite monastery which had been erected on the battlefield of the White Mountain, called on the Bohemians to display more self-respect and cease performing their devotions on the site of their own abasement?44

We have here to do with patterns of ideas which were anyway in process of formation since the early eighteenth century. If this indigenous sense of history seems not to be in best harmony with the still widespread conception of a philosophie des lumie`res dedicated to debunking tradition, it had all the more in common with the first stirrings of a regionally or nationally based patriotism in the most important non-German lands of the Monarchy: Bohemia and Hungary. Let me draw a few examples from Bohemia, where the original impulse to a revival of Czech even smacked of atavism, since it drew so heavily on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century linguistic forms. Thus Frantisˇek Martin Pelcl edited a Czech travel account from the late Renaissance with an introduction where he quotes from letters of the great humanists Hassenstein of Lobkowitz ˇerotıń in the vernacular. Among Procha´zka’s publications was a further and Z travel narrative of that period, as well as a work by Erasmus in Czech translation; and his already mentioned people’s Bible drew richly on the acclaimed Kralice version prepared by the Bohemian Brethren in the 1590s. Ignaz Cornova revised the noted text by Pavel Strańsky´ on the Bohemian state in the Renaissance age, expanding it now, a century and a half on, into seven volumes; and the historical collections of Steinbach and Monse in Moravia contain similar sources.45 Particularly interesting in this regard is the figure of the jurist Joseph Anton Riegger, the son of a famous and controversial campaigner for Josephinist legal principles, who settled in Prague and brought together all sorts of valuable materials for the study of old Bohemia. Meanwhile Dobrovsky´ was definitively establishing the presumption of a golden age of Czech language and literature in the days of Rudolf II, the last decades before the assault by Counter-Reformation and the onset of the temno, or baroque darkness.46 44 See e.g. Succincta Deductio jurium et gravaminum Evangelicorum utriusque Confessionis in Hungaria (n.p., 1790); Ilona Marko´, II. Jo´zsef és az erde´lyi sza´szok (Bp., 1940) (Saxons). Denis, Cˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, i, III, 195 (White Mountain). 45 Pr ˇ´ıhody Waćslawa Wratislawa z Mitrowic, ed. F. M. Pelzel (sic) (Pr., 1777). J. Hanusˇ, Frantisˇek Faustin Procha´zka, ˇcesky´ buditel a litera´rnı´ historik (Pr., 1915); cf. Vlcˇek, Deˇjiny, ii. 178–81. Paul [Pavel] Strańsky, Staat von Bo¨hmen, trans. and ed. I. Cornova (7 vols., Pr., 1792–1803). For Moravia, cf. my survey in Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg, 1711–94: Neue Perspektiven zu Politik und Kultur der europaïschen Aufkla¨rung, ed. G. Klingenstein and F. Szabo (Graz, 1996), 383–99. 46 J. A. von Riegger (comp.), Materialien zur . . . Statistik von Bo ¨hmen (12 vols., Pr./Leipzig, 1781–94); id. (ed.), Archiv fur Geschichte und Statistik, insbesondere von Bo¨hmen (3 vols., Dresden,

50


This notion of a temno, a preceding time of obscurity, was later explicitly formulated in terms of an antithesis to the Aufkla¨rung and raised to the level of a commonplace, not just for Bohemia. So far we have indeed mostly contemplated the rise of a practical, rational movement which arraigned the existing order on a wide front. But this endeavour, precisely because its roots lay deep within the old system, remained correspondingly attached to the former regime and could yield only limited results. Suffice it to dwell here a little on the most striking feature in that respect: the continuing prominence of priests in the intellectual life of the Monarchy. Ignaz de Luca, who was the first to compile a history of literature based on an Austrian perspective in the broadest sense, drew up a list of 437 living authors in the mid-1770s: 236 of them are laymen and 201 clergy.47 Revealingly the anticlerical de Luca uses his figures to reproach idlers in the church, which should in his view have contributed a yet higher percentage! Had he only possessed more information about circumstances in the provinces, that would indeed have been the case. Much the same state of affairs is alluded to in a well-known but enigmatic remark by Maria Theresa, when in 1774 the establishment of an Austrian academy of sciences was proposed: ‘I couldn’t possibly decide to set up an accademie des scienses [sic] with three ex-Jesuits and one professor of chemistry, however worthy; we should be a laughing-stock in the world.’48 A comprehensive stock-taking would doubtless confirm this situation later in the century too. After the wave of apparent secularization in the eighties a Spanish ecclesiastic came to Vienna and was struck by the achievements of his fellow-clergy (only good theologians were conspicuous by their absence). His unjustly neglected account hints at how much the priesthood still set the tone, even in the capital, not to speak of those more outlying regions which form the main focus of the present observations.49 Among the clergy the regular orders dominated. De Luca names 92 ex-Jesuits, 21 Piarists, 24 Benedictines, and so forth. This direct legacy of counter-reforming contemplative and ascetic ideals naturally acted as a brake on innovative efforts. Most monastery libraries seem from 1740 or so hardly to have kept up with contemporary literature, especially in modern languages. The archabbey of Mons Pannoniae, or Pannonhalma, Hungary’s most important monastic foundation, owned fewer books in 1760 than a hundred years earlier, just after it had been regained from the Turks.50 Besides, Maria Theresa’s takeover of the censorship in 1792–5). On Riegger pe`re, see E. Seifert, Paul Joseph Riegger, 1705–75 (Berlin, 1973). J. Dobrovsky´, ‘Geschichte der bo¨hmischen Sprache und Literatur’, first in Abhandlungen der ko¨niglichen bo¨hmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft (1791), then the following year as a separate publication; cf. Schamschula, Anfa¨nge, 203 ff. 47 Luca, Das gelehrte O 48 Ja ¨ sterreich, esp. ii.481 ff. ¨ger, ‘Eindringen’, 456. 49 J. Andres, Carta a su hermano D. Carlos Andres dandole noticia de la literatura di Viena (Madrid, 1794). 50 L. Erde ´lyi et al. (ed.), A pannonhalmi Szent Benedek-Rend to¨rteńete, vol. v (Bp., 1907), 402 f.; cf. Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 312. Cf. also the position at the Bohemian Premonstratensian canonry of Tepl: Huber, ‘Stift Tepl’.


51

the 1750s led to a divergence between Habsburg and papal indexes which put many monasteries to the test. The Collegium Norbertinum in Prague, for example, was an institution of higher education run by the Premonstratensians of Strahov in close cooperation with the local archiepiscopal seminary. It boasted a quite extensive and well-kept library, but recent works hardly appear in its catalogue. On the contrary, whereas into the 1760s the Libri Prohibiti made up a minute part of it, the index issued by Benedict XIV in 1764 prompted a fit of reactionary zeal: now all manner of half-forgotten Lutherans and gentle-spirited Jansenists found themselves ‘ad scrinium prohibitorum translati.’51 Yet the religious orders, for as much as they belonged to the innermost essence of baroque culture, partook also of its contradictions. Various of their members exhibited real curiosity; some shared the mood for reform. Benedictines stood in the forefront, with their historians from Pez and Bessel to Ziegelbauer, Piter, and others, or their observatory at Kremsmu¨nster.52 Individual Augustinians, like the antiquary Xystus Schier (a genuine Austro-Hungarian, since he operated in the border town of Bruck) and the diligent Slovene linguistic researcher Marko Pohlin, and Piarists, such as the tireless literary historian Horańyi, vied with them. And Jesuits, as de Luca’s figures indicate, accounted both before and after their dissolution for a considerable proportion of the new learned activity: we need think only of Gyo¨rgy Pray, director of the university library in Pest, and his colleague Istvań Katona, compiler of the forty-two-volume Historia critica regum Hungariae.53 Of the two most significant remodellers of the Habsburg educational system, the elder, Johann Joseph Felbiger, served from 1758 as abbot of the Augustinian canonry at Sagan, by now in Silesia, until he followed the imperial call to Vienna in 1774; while the younger, (Franz) Stephan Rautenstrauch, was the previous year unanimously elected to the headship of the leading Benedictine abbey in Bohemia, the bipolar foundation of Brˇevnov-Braunau. Steinbach too was ˇd’a´r nad Sa´zavou in Moravia. an abbot: he presided over the Cistercian house of Z In 1784, after a fire, he underwent the dissolution of his own monastery.54 Altogether the generation of the rising Hochaufkla¨rung included many regulars. In Bohemia there were the Piarists Dobner and Voigt, the Premonstratensian 51 Strahov Library, Prague, MS. D L III 15: ‘Catalogus Librorum inclyti Collegii Norbertini Pragae compilatus’ (1768); a brief history of this Collegium ibid. MS. D J IV 1–2: Annales Seminarii S. Norberti 1637–1785. Cf. also ibid. MS. D LIII 33: ‘Catalogus Bibliothecae Milovicensis’ (i.e. of the Premonstratensian house at Milevsko/Mu¨hlhausen in Bohemia). 52 Hans Sturmberger, ‘Studien zur Geschichte der Aufkla ¨rung des 18. Jahrhunderts in ¨ IG 53 (1939), 423–80; cf. in general the interesting reflections by Gustav Kremsmu¨nster’, MO Otruba, ‘Probleme von Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in ihren Beziehungen zu Kirche und Klerus in ¨ sterreich’, in Katholische Aufkla¨rung, ed. Kovaćs, 107–39. O 53 Such figures have hitherto only been explored very sporadically by historians: e.g. F. L. Miksch, Der Augustinerhistoriker Xystus Schier, 1727–72 (Wu¨rzburg, 1969); Ba´lint Ho´man, To¨rteńetı´ra´s és forra´skritika (Bp., 1938), 353 ff. (Pray, Katona). The editorial and compilatory work of Elek Horańyi stands especially in need of appraisal. 54 Winfried Romberg, Johann Ignaz von Felbinger und Kardinal Johann Heinrich von Franckenberg: Wege der religio¨sen Reform im 18. Jahrhundert (Sigmaringen, 1999). Menzel, Rautenstrauch, 105 ff. On Steinbach, see Ottu˚v slovnı´k naucˇny´, 24 (Pr., 1906), 80 f.

52


Ungar, the Minim Procha´zka, the Pauline Durich, the ex-Jesuit Cornova. Even the young Dobrovsky´ almost entered the Society of Jesus, and he retained important humanist principles of thought from his instruction by the fathers.55 Hungary experienced much the same evolution: there progressive Piarists like Berna´t Benya´k and Ka´roly Koppi or Paulines like Ferenc Verseghy had open access to the works of Feńelon, Wolff, and other philosophers of the Enlightenment in monastery libraries. Even the career of the maverick (and later Lutheran) Ignaz Aurel Fessler would be inconceivable without his years as a Capuchin novice.56 Many such interesting advocates of moderate reform have fallen into almost complete oblivion: among them Maria Theresa’s favourite, Pius Manzador, who left the Viennese house of the Barnabites to act successively as general of the order and then as first bishop of Hermannstadt/Nagyszeben in Transylvania.57 More familiar is the share of secular clergy in this process, and that has frequently been associated in recent literature with a Jansenist persuasion.58 Yet their views are not simply to be equated with Jansenism. Often it was less a matter of dogmatic, ethical, or indeed liturgical aspirations as of a mental rejection of inherited forms and conventions which gained strong impetus from the shift in attitudes towards humanism and history which we have just examined. Priests inclined towards Jansenism could certainly be found in the provinces, especially in Bohemia and Moravia, at Pressburg (among the Slav seminarists) and Ljubljana (around Bishop Herberstein and Canon Jurij Japelj); but I suspect that its contribution was rarely decisive.59 One instance may help to illustrate some of the points just made. Jo´zsef Batthyańy, son of a future Palatine of Hungary, took up an ecclesiastical career at the beginning of the 1750s, becoming archbishop of Kalocsa and then of Esztergom, and as such primate of the country and a cardinal.60 In this capacity he became the acknowledged leader of opposition to Joseph’s church reforms: his Remonstrance of 1782 appeared in Italian, Latin, German, French, and purportedly also in English. However, in the last resort Batthyańy held his protest campaign within limits. Even the papal nuncio commented on his lack of Ludvı´kovsky´, Dobrovske´ho klasicka´ humanita, 56 ff. Sańdor Taka´ts, Benya´k Berna´t és a magyar oktata´su¨gy (Bp., 1891); K. Pallo´s, 18. sza´zadve´gi szerzetesı´roínk és a felvila´gosoda´s (Bp., n.d.); Gerencse´r, A magyar felvila´gosoda´s. I. A. Fessler, Ru¨ckblicke auf seine siebzigja¨hrige Pilgerschaft (2nd edn., Leipzig, 1851). 57 Ja ńos Temesva´ry, ‘Manzador Pius’, Magyar Ko¨nyvszemle, ns 37 (1930), 215–42; cf. Reinhardt, ‘Kirchenreform’. Also Bahlcke, Ungarischer Episkopat, 147–50. 58 See the very authoritative account by Peter Hersche, Der Spa ¨ sterreich ¨ tjansenismus in O (V., 1977), which however, apart from some suggestive discussion of Moravia, treats mainly of developments in Vienna and the Alpine provinces. Cf. also Franz Wehrl, ‘Der ‘‘neue Geist’’: ¨ StA 20 (1967), eine Untersuchung der Geistesrichtungen des Klerus in Wien von 1750–90’, in MO 59 More on this in ch. 8 below. 36–114. 60 For what follows, see OL P 1314, nos. 59779–60381 (private correspondence of Jo ´ zsef Batthyańy) and various files in the Batthyańy section of the Esztergom Primatial Archives. This source merits more extensive treatment. 55 56


53

‘drive and courage’.61 Before 1780 he had close dealings with many Enlightenment figures; apparently he was on good terms with the Emperor himself (whose tutor, it may be recalled, had been Batthyańy’s own uncle). After 1790 Joseph’s deeply suspicious successor, Leopold II, had no doubt about the Cardinal’s reliability.62 From Batthyańy’s five-language correspondence one gains the impression of an urbane cleric, who is anything but a Jansenist, and no neologist or Voltairean either; yet who simply despises much of the baroque inheritance. Indeed, he had found it difficult to settle on an ecclesiastical career: ‘Au lieu que ma re´solution [to become a priest] me console, elle me de´sole’, he wrote at that time; and his overriding concern was to be able to retain his valet. Instead Batthyańy gave himself over to his recreations, in the first place to his precious collections of books and documents (during the 1760s and 1770s he was deeply in debt to Italian bankers).63 He drew on these for the rigorously historical argumentation of the Remonstrance. Similar figures could be found elsewhere among the Hungarian prelates: the primate’s relative, Ignać Batthyańy, in Transylvania; his predecessor Barkoćzy at Esztergom; Ka´roly Esterha´zy at Eger, Gyo¨rgy Klimo´ at Pećs, and so on.

How do the findings of this essay bear upon the broad picture of intellectual change in the late eighteenth-century Habsburg Monarchy? We have followed certain currents which emerged substantially earlier, as a result of the breakdown of baroque institutions or the decadence of baroque structures of thought, and which already reached maturity by the 1770s. Their representatives professed a very mild form of Enlightenment, one distinctively coloured by stimuli from a blend of domestic and foreign sources. With the ‘official’ Aufkla¨rung around dynasty and government they stood in a relationship far more of interaction than of subordination. Josephinism could exploit them to some extent; but inversely, they determined to a great extent the practical success of Josephinism. All depended on whether the Emperor’s objectives were rooted in already tended ground. For we must recognize too that the Enlightenment tendencies which we have been pursuing gathered strength at exactly the same time as their opponents finally made good their appeal to the bulk of the population. Doubts 61 I have used the Italian edition: Rimostranza di sua Eminenza il Cardinale Giuseppe a Batthian (Assisi, 1783); cf. Domokos Kosa´ry, Bevezete´s a magyar to¨rteńelem forra´saiba és irodalma´ba (3 vols., Bp., 1951–8), ii. 265. Tomko, Errichtung der Dio¨zesen, 9 f., 46 ff., 62 (nuncio). Evidence of Batthyańy’s moderation over the Remonstrance: Primatial Archive, Esztergom, Batthyańy II Intr. no. 50/8. 62 Esp. OL P 1314, no. 60025, on his relations with Joseph II. For Uncle Ka ´roly, cf. above, pp. 19, 21, 30. E. Ma´lyusz (ed.), Sańdor Lipo´t fo˝herceg na´dor iratai, 1790–5 (Bp., 1926), 292–5, 434, 454 (Leopold). 63 Comments of the young Batthya ńy: OL P 1314, nos. 59892 ff. OL P 1318, fasc. 2, contains promissory notes for huge sums, especially in favour of the Genoese house of Brentano Cimaroli. These debts evidently mounted up also as a result of property and family transactions.

54


about the achievements of the Counter-Reformation, in other words, trickled down from above, exactly as the Counter-Reformation had itself had to gain recognition some 150 years before; the values and content of the baroque did not crumble away from below. In Catholic Hungary that became particularly apparent. There the mid-century decades witnessed a veritable heyday of emotional piety, sumptuous decoration, and grass-roots cults of the miraculous and mystical.64 In the calmer and more self-satisfied atmosphere of Austria and Bohemia, however, the same phenomenon can be observed. The countless books of devotions and invocations of saints which are recorded in the Czech national bibliography testify indeed to an increased reading public, but were bad news for popular reformers, to say nothing of full-blooded Josephinists.65 Of course, there was also a more radical Enlightenment, which points beyond Josephinism. The ‘Jacobins’ of East-Central Europe have been the subject of much productive scholarship over recent decades, writing which—unusually for the area—has been pursued on a genuinely international and comparative basis.66 In light of that it may seem surprising that the harbingers of such radical convictions, French influences during the earlier Aufkla¨rung, have been so little investigated. Once upon a time it was naively assumed that the enthusiasm for French models from the time of Kaunitz’s mid-century renversement des alliances onwards comprised almost the sum total of the Austrian Enlightenment. Commentators pointed to French fashion in its often superficial manifestations, to French journals, to the French theatre in Vienna, to indigenous editions of French-language literature as well as the genuine publications from francophone Europe which found their way into contemporary noble libraries despite the vagaries of the Maria-Theresan censorship. What was formerly the source of exaggeration by historians of ideas is now in danger of being largely ignored, a point to which I shall revert in the next chapter.67 64 Evidence in: O ¨ do¨n Ma´lna´si, Gro´f Csa´ky Imre bı´bornok élete és kora, 1672–1732 (Kalocsa, 1933); Piszker, Barokk vila´g Gyo˝regyha´zmegye´ben; Gyula Jańosi, Barokk hite´let Magyarorsza´gon a XVIII. sza´zad ko¨zepeń (Pannonhalma, 1935); Ka´lmań Juha´sz, ‘Jesuiten im Banat, 1718–73’, ¨ StA 11 (1958), 153–220; Ga´bor Tu¨ske´s, Bućsu´ja´ra´s a barokk kori Magyarorsza´gon a MO mira´kulumirodalom tu¨kre´ben (Bp., 1993); id. and E´va Knapp, Ne´pi valla´sossa´g Magyarorsza´gon a 17–18. sza´zadban: forra´sok, forma´k, ko¨zvetı´to˝k (Bp., 2001). Cf. also Sańdor Ba´lint and Ga´bor Barna, Bućsu´ja´ro´ magyarok: a magyarorsza´gi bućsu´ja´ra´s to¨rteńete és ne´prajza (Bp., 1994). 65 Z. Tobolka und F. Hora ´k (comp.), Knihopis ˇceskyćh a slovenskyćh tisku˚, vol. ii (9 pts, Pr., 1939–67), nos. 5655–5901, 7872–8339, 9921–11204, 12876–12950, 13145–13226. For a belated ¨ StA 48 (2000), 379–404. instance of the cult of the pietas Austriaca, see Werner Telesko in MO 66 Pioneering works were Ernst Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials: Government Policy and Public Opinion in the Habsburg Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution (L., 1959), and Walter Markov, ‘I giacobini dei paesi absburgici’, Studi Storici, 3 (1962), 493–525. Further examples from the heyday of the genre: Bohuslav Lesńodorski, Les Jacobins polonais (Paris, 1965), ch. 7; Ka´lmań Benda, Emberbara´t vagy hazafi? (Bp., 1978), esp. 232–86; various works by Helmut Reinalter, esp. Aufgekla¨rter Absolutismus und Revolution (V., 1980); L. Haas, Wolnomularstwo w Europie ´srodkowo-wschodniej w XVIII. i XIX. wieku (Warsaw, 1981). 67 See below, pp. 58f.


55

Without a figure like Count Maximilian Lamberg, for example, our picture of the Austrian Enlightenment would be incomplete. This free-thinker was filled, in fact saturated, with the thinking of the philosophes and their salon culture, with mental and physical Reisefieber—he continually moved around, mostly in Germany and Italy. Lamberg (1729–92) wrote a masterwork in the Frenchifying manner, the Me´morial d’un mondain, whose second, expanded edition appeared in London in the year of the outbreak of the American Revolution, and which with its bizarre appendices lies stylistically somewhere between Laurence Sterne and Heimito von Doderer.68 Lamberg represents a liminal but indispensable case-study in the varieties of the later eighteenth-century Central-European Zeitgeist. By contrast I have here sought to sketch a broader and more populous constituency, where the spirit of Enlightenment operated in a more home-grown environment, and where the outcomes were different, though in the end every bit as subversive of accepted values as those of the unorthodox aristocrat. Their chief result was the strengthening of a humanistically transfigured and historically underpinned consciousness of particularity. Aufkla¨rung became first a patriotic and then a national awakening.69 Let us recall Kinsky, that ‘good descendant of the Slavs’, as he described himself , with his ‘Slavonic prejudices’. Or even Lamberg, who on occasion—with the slogan ‘je suis Morave’—declared allegiance to his narrower fatherland and ended his outlandish literary odyssey on a Moravian landed estate.70

68 For Lamberg’s life, see the ‘Episode historique sur l’auteur de ce Me ´morial’, at the beginning of his Me´morial d’un mondain (n.p., 1774; 2nd edn., 2 vols., L., 1776), and Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v. Some of his letters are in Josef V. Polisˇensky´, ‘Korespondence moravske´ho osvıćence Maxe Lamberga s J. F. Opizem o Francouzske´ revoluci’, Cˇasopis Matice Moravske´, 71 69 Cf. below, ch. 8. (1952), 140–8, and in Michaud, ‘Lumie`res’. 70 F. J. Kinsky, Erinnerungen u ¨ ber einen wichtigen Gegenstand (Pr., 1773), 131–6, 201 ff. Lamberg, Me´morial d’un mondain, i. 202 ff.

4 Culture and Authority in Central Europe, 1683–1806 This is a companion piece to the preceding one, and links also with other chapters, especially ch. 8. It sketches the relation between Enlightenment culture, in its Aufkla¨rung variant, and the evolving state in the Habsburg lands and beyond. The powerful French influence at mid-eighteenth century is noted, then the rival PrussianProtestant model. A closely related issue is that of patriotism and its relation to these trans-national or trans-regional currents. Whose cause did the patriotic vogue serve? Then, in all brevity, the social foundations of the changing cultural structures in the region are suggested, along with their implications for art and aesthetics. The underlying question addressed is how far, and to what effect, the state took over from the court as purveyor and fashioner of culture. This is an area in which much work has been done since this essay was originally conceived, and it therefore seeks also to draw attention to current debates.

In another place I took as a theme for some reflections on German intellectual evolution in the period 1540–1680 the juxtaposition of ‘culture’ and ‘anarchy’, concluding that it was precisely the divisions in the body politic of the German Reich which helped to sustain the distinctively international flavour of its cultural life in the age of late humanism and beyond.1 My subject here comprises a later period and a further juxtaposition: that of ‘culture’ and ‘authority’. I wish to examine how cosmopolitan disjunction gradually gave way to national and official conjunction, as intellectual and artistic life accommodated themselves to the authority of increasingly well-ordered states within and beside the Empire. By some way the most important of those states was the Habsburg Monarchy, whose dynasty had borne and continued to bear the imperial crown, and whose fortunes serve to delimit my terminal dates of a long eighteenth century: from 1683, the deliverance of Vienna from the Turks, to 1804/6, the replacement of a German with a merely Austrian imperial title. My argument concerns the process of transition, which quickened markedly during the latter half of that period. Nevertheless it is a striking convenience that the chronological mid-point, the early 1740s, represents also the turning point, as the War of the Unpublished; first drafted 1990 for a conference at Princeton University. 1 ‘Culture and Anarchy in the Empire, 1540–1680’, Central European History, 18 (1985), 14–30.

Culture and Authority

57

Austrian Succession threatened the future of the Monarchy and threw imperial traditions into turmoil. ‘Baroque’ and ‘Enlightenment’ are useful labels to apply to the decades before and after the 1740s, in so far as culture may be found to march with politics. But the real evolutionary structure is provided by a pattern of confrontationcum-receptivity, first on an international, then on a national plane. We shall pursue two overlapping bouts of Austrian rivalry-cum-emulation, first of a foreign enemy and model, France; then of an adversary within the Reich, Prussia. In each case some twenty years of intermittent armed conflict led on to decades of stand-off, and eventually to alliance (before the cycle of conflict was ultimately renewed). The political ‘anarchy’ of the Empire, we shall find, could still prove culturally productive; but it continued to need stimulus from outside. Now, with the growing hegemony and counter-hegemony of Vienna and Berlin, and the lesser foci of power among the rest of the German states, the Reich became terminally enfeebled, though the extent of that decrepitude remains a subject of lively debate.2 The efflorescence of High Baroque in the Habsburg lands possessed, of course, its own close antecedents before the 1680s and its own artistic logic. But it was conditioned then by two main historical factors. One was the heady military and political successes of the dynasty and its attendant aristocracy, which yielded a reckless and extravagant wave of building and decoration, as if to persuade the world—and themselves—that Austrian great power had come to stay. Contemporary perceptions of the function of the visual and representational in central European baroque culture at its climax are well illustrated from the pages of one of its best-known handbooks, Johann Christian Lu¨nig’s Theatrum Ceremoniale: ‘Most people, especially the lower orders (Po¨bel ), are so constituted that sensual impressions and imagination accomplish more with them than wit and understanding; and they can therefore be moved rather by such things as tickle the senses and strike the eye than by the most compelling and clearest arguments. This wonderment yields respect and reverence, whence come subordination and obedience.’3 Such regulation was rarely, perhaps, envisaged so clearly by its chief beneficiaries. At all events they did not conceive it as a merely Austrian purpose. The Reich actually revived as a notion after 1683, in opposition first to the Turks 2 For significant recent discussion, see above all Aretin, Das Alte Reich; also Christof Dipper, Deutsche Geschichte 1648–1789 (Frankfurt, 1991); John G. Gagliardo, Germany under the Old Regime, 1600–1790 (L., 1991); Peter H. Wilson, From Reich to Revolution: German History, 1558–1806 (L., 2004). 3 Cited in Magdalena Hawlik-van de Water, Der scho ¨ne Tod: Zeremonialstrukturen des Wiener Hofes bei Tod und Begra¨bnis zwischen 1640 und 1740 (V., 1989), 12. Cf. the words of another prominent commentator, Julius Bernhard Rohr, in 1733: ‘Der gemeine Mann, welcher bloß an den aüßerlichen Sinnen hangt und die Vernunft wenig gebrauchet, kann sich nicht allein recht vorstellen, was die Majesta¨t des Ko¨nigs ist, aber durch die Dinge, so in die Augen fallen und seine u¨brigen Sinne beru¨hren, bekommt er einen klaren Begriff von seiner Majesta¨t, Macht und Gewalt.’ Hubert C. Ehalt, Ausdrucksformen absolutistischer Herrschaft (Mun., 1980), 65.

58


and then to Louis XIV, and especially in the person of the youthful and vigorous Archduke Joseph, Emperor Joseph I from 1705. There is clear evidence in a political tract entitled Ehren-Ruff Teutschlands by his tutor, Wagner von Wagenfels, which combines fierce anti-French polemic with the concept of Germany as a single harmonious cultural entity, embracing also the author’s own ‘narrower’ (eigentlich) Austrian patrimony.4 As such, the Viennese model could make a widespread stylistic appeal over much of the rest of the Empire, even while the programme began to be displaced in the Habsburgs’ own priorities after the early death of Joseph in 1711 and the subsequent uninspiring and illdirected leadership of his brother, Charles VI. The other prime constituent of the fully-fledged baroque sensibility in Austria was, as we have already seen, a continuing impetus towards, and need for, Counter-Reformation in Catholic Central Europe. In parts of the Monarchy heresy remained rife well into the eighteenth century—not just in Hungary, where it was fully institutionalized, but in Alpine valleys and in remoter parts of Bohemia and Moravia. This endeavour too had its wider resonance and its thoroughly international component in the work of the religious orders, particularly the dominance of the Jesuits, unrivalled as an educational and intellectual force throughout the Habsburg lands, southern Germany, and Poland. While the actual personnel active in Austria in learning and literature, music and the visual arts became increasingly native or at least naturalized, their inspiration was still largely foreign and cosmopolitan.5

Underlying that continuity, however, is a paradoxical change: the debt to the enemy power of France, whose cultural impact grew rapidly at the expense of the Italian, Latin, and Spanish influences so marked in seventeenth-century Central Europe. ‘Universal’ values revealed themselves more and more often as predominantly Gallic ones. The direct or indirect significance of the model of Louis XIV’s government and society, and of the associated intellectual and artistic enterprises, for Germany as a whole is a commonplace: we are familiar not just with the fascination exerted by Versailles, but with such French-inspired initiatives as Thomasius’s worldly-wise philosophy, first proclaimed during the 1680s at the very time of greatest pressure from Louis.6 Its effects on Austria are likewise often assumed, though surprisingly little studied in detail. Individual Frenchmen (and only few Frenchwomen) purveyed the influence, men like the architects Mathey and later Jadot. So did groups such as the circle around Prince Eugene, his library and collections at Vienna in the first decades of the eighteenth century. So did the close connections established when the Southern 4 Wilhelm Bauer in MO ¨ IG 41 (1926), 257–72; cf. Ingrao, In Quest and Crisis, 31–4. Cf. 5 Cf. above, pp. 7–9, 22–4. above, p. 11. 6 W. Schneiders (ed.), Christian Thomasius 1655–1728: Interpretationen zu Werk und Wirkung (Hamburg, 1989).


59

Netherlands passed into Austrian Habsburg hands from 1713 and then when the Duke of Lorraine married Charles VI’s daughter Maria Theresa, in the 1730s. The whole role of Nancy as cultural mediator east of the Rhine at this time deserves to be better appreciated: it simultaneously became equally important for Poland through Stanislas Leszczyn´ski, Louis XV’s father-in-law, who was pensioned off as the next duke of Lorraine.7 French ideas and fashions penetrated as far east as provincial Transylvania, where indeed enthusiasm for Cartesian principles among local Calvinists provided them with one of their first footholds. They swelled to a peak in midcentury, at the time of the renversement des alliances, to embrace many Austrian readers of the philosophes and even more who followed the literary small change of the day. A Gazette de Vienne appeared between 1757 and 1766; a French court theatre operated there in the 1750s and 1760s. Above all French was a linguistic fashion: for example, in much family correspondence of the Habsburgs themselves; in the official and private letters of Cornelius Neny, Maria Theresa’s cabinet secretary in the 1760s, as of many aristocrats, artists, and musicians, even of prelates like Cardinals Migazzi and Batthyańy, archbishop of Vienna and primate of Hungary respectively; in the famous court diaries (over sixty volumes) of Count Karl Zinzendorf. It survived as such through the rest of the century and beyond: much of the anti-French diplomacy after 1790 proceeded in the language of the foe, which remained an essential part of Austrian bon ton long into the age of Metternich.8 Austria, like Germany, also produced its full-blooded participants in the francophone sie`cle des lumie`res: mostly men of high status like the exquisite salon figure from Moravia, Count Maximilian Lamberg, and the Hungarian poet, Count Jańos Fekete, both of whom we have already met.9 Yet the thrust of the German Enlightenment was markedly different: to stress that nowadays is happily to push at an open door. Even when closely associated with speculative traditions within the Empire, the Aufkla¨rung exhibited characteristically practical, 7 Miscellaneous materials in the twin volumes Charles Alexandre de Lorraine: l’homme, le marećhal, le grand maıˆtre, ed. L. Duerloo, and Charles Alexandre de Lorraine: gouverneur-geńe´ral des Pays-Bas autrichiens, ed. C. Lemaire (both Brussels, 1987). For the Polish connection: Pierre Boye´, La Cour polonaise de Lune´ville, 1737–66 (Nancy, [1926]); Edmund Cieslak, Stanisł aw Leszczyn´ski (Wrocław, 1994). 8 For all this: Schmidt, ‘Voltaire und Maria Theresia’; Zolta ń Baranyai, A francia nyelv és mu˝veltse´g Magyarorsza´gon a XVIII. sza´zadban (Bp., 1920); V. Oravecz, Les Impressions françaises de Vienne (Szeged, 1930); Ilona Vassko´, A pećsi pu¨spo¨ki ko¨nyvta´r francia nyomtatvańyai és ke´ziratai (Pećs, 1934). Sańdor Eckhardt, A francia forradalom eszmeí Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1924); id., De Sicambria a` Sans-Souci (Paris, 1943), esp. 265–81; Adrienne D. Hytier, ‘Joseph II, la cour de Vienne et les philosophes’, Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century, 103 (1973), 225–51; Ko¨peczi and Sziklay (ed.), ‘Sorsotok elo˝re ne´zze´tek’; B. Ko¨peczi (ed.), Les Lumie`res en Hongrie, en Europe centrale et en Europe orientale (Bp., 1981); cf. Michaud, ‘Lumie`res’; Derek Beales, ‘Christians and ‘‘philosophes’’: The Case of the Austrian Enlightenment’, in History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honour of Owen Chadwick (Camb., 1985), 169–94, now also in his Enlightenment and Reform, 60–89. 9 For Lamberg, see above, ch. 3, n. 68. For Fekete, see above, p. 31 and nn. 37–8.

60


even utilitarian concerns; unlike its French equivalent it enjoyed a large measure of (semi-)official support and was led by state-controlled universities, especially in Prussia. Even in Austria, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was beginning to manifest its effectiveness before the crucial date of 1740.10 In that year Maria Theresa succeeded her father in the Habsburg dominions, but promptly found herself attacked by a constellation of forces in the Reich and beyond, which launched a more than merely political challenge to the dynasty. The contest laid bare deep rifts within the Catholic camp, as hostilities with France were renewed and the Bavarians pressed their claim to Bohemia. But the real damage was wreaked by Prussia, and—what matters most in this context—Maria Theresa attributed her loss of Silesia to Protestant cultural superiority. She sought to gain revenge as soon as possible. As later, in 1866, defeat—albeit only partial—in a German civil war elicited a much sharper reaction from Austria’s ruler than any reverse at the hands of outsiders.11 The Habsburg government immediately set about dismantling its baroque cultural structures, which were already beginning to be undermined from within by incipient criticisms of the Society of Jesus and by a receptivity to certain kinds of innovation. Jesuit control was assailed: both from near at hand, by the challenge of rival ecclesiastical corporations, especially the Piarists, whose important Prague school, for instance, opened in 1752; and from a distance, by reformers much less convinced of the place of miracle or tradition in Catholic intellectual life. Their foremost spokesman was Gerhart van Swieten, the Queen’s physician and later librarian, an immigrant who transmitted, via Belgium, the priorities of the Dutch universities. Others followed from northern Germany, bringing to Vienna and lesser centres the new sciences of cameralism and natural law. Reverence was rapidly redirected from qualities to quantities, and that epitome of the old order, the baroque thesis announcement, with its pompous formalism, came to yield to more sober academic pursuits.12 A wider movement in society accompanied these changes, a kind of capillary action of many other immigrants, imported to serve the revitalization of the Habsburg state—Protestants or converts or liberal Catholics, rising in the bureaucracy, in trade and industry, or in the army, and significant in their 10 For Austria, cf. ch. 3 above. General surveys by Thomas P. Saine, The Problem of Being Modern, or, The German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution (Detroit, 1999); Richard van Du¨lmen, Die Gesellschaft der Aufkla¨rer: Zur bu¨rgerlichen Emanzipation und aufkla¨rerischen Kultur in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M., 1986; Eng. trans. 1992); Andreas Gestrich, ¨ ffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Absolutismus und O Jahrhunderts (Go¨ttingen, 1994). Comparative view in James van H. Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Camb., 2001); T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Ox., 2002). 11 Cf. Werner Bein, Schlesien in der habsburgischen Politik: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des Dualismus im Alten Reich (Sigmaringen, 1994). 12 Frank T. Brechka, Gerard van Swieten and his World, 1700–72 (The Hague, 1970). Oldr ˇich J. Blazˇ´ıcˇek, Theses in Universitate Carolina Pragensi disputatae (7 pts., Pr., 1967–70); cf. J. Trˇ´ıˇska (ed.), Vy´bor ze starsˇ´ı prazˇske´ universitnı´ literatury (Pr., 1977).


61

collective careers and contacts, the bearers of broader currents of less elevated ideas.13 At the same time an institutional base for the formulation and discussion of reform was provided by the mushroom-like growth of a network of freemasonic lodges. The first traces of Freemasonry appeared in the Monarchy more or less simultaneously with its beginnings in the Protestant North, around 1740, papal comminations being outweighed by the active support of Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis Stephen (Emperor Francis I from 1745). But it blossomed later in the Habsburg lands. Of the approximately 27,000 lodge members calculated for the whole Reich by a recent analyst, a considerable proportion by the 1770s and 1780s were Austrians.14

Her government’s policies from the 1740s on only exacerbated the other prime cultural problem of Maria Theresa: the nature of loyalty to the Habsburg state. The Austrian Monarchy was now evidently more distinct than ever from the rest of the Reich: in the ruler’s own person (for Maria Theresa was ‘Empress’ solely as a consort and then, after Francis’s death in 1765, as a dowager); in the enhanced role within the Monarchy of Hungary (whence Maria Theresa’s foremost dignity as queen—or strictly speaking as king), which did not form part of the Empire at all; then in the confrontational Reichspolitik of her son Joseph. Yet feelings of allegiance towards it were essentially derivative upon a sense of adherence to Germany—let us recall Wagner’s approach, cited earlier—and that became a vital consideration in the age of absolutist reform. The whole attack on privilege, on corporations, on provincial status, etc., undertaken by ‘enlightened despots’ like Maria Theresa and Joseph II, involved a new stress on citizenship. The language of government, especially its myriad administrative enactments, becomes peppered with talk of the Bu¨rger and Bu¨rgertum, or with references to the ‘Volk’ as an object of policy. As the Bohemian Josephinist Gebler put it, in a formulation to which I shall return, ‘little by little the state must work towards becoming a people’.15 Now the cultural concomitant of citizenship was patriotism: not to be regarded merely as some weak precursor of nineteenth-century nationalism, or as the vague xenophobia of earlier more inchoate polities, or as an oppositional formation in the coming age of revolution. Those sentiments certainly belonged to the notion of a patriot;16 but more significant from our vantage point is its See above, pp. 41 ff. The standard history is still Ludwig Abafi, Geschichte der Freimaurerei in Oesterreich-Ungarn (5 vols., Bp., 1890–9). For the figures, see Winfried Dotzauer in Aufkla¨rung und Geheimgesellschaften: Zur politischen Funktion und Sozialstruktur der Freimauererlogen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Reinalter (Mun., 1989), 109–49. 15 ‘Der Staat muß darauf arbeiten, nach und nach ein Volk zu werden’: cited in Pavel Beˇlina, ‘Teoreticke´ korˇeny a sta´tnı´ praxe osvıćenske´ho absolutismu v habsburske´ monarchii’, CsCˇH, 29 (1981), 879–904, at 904. 16 Good introduction in O. Dann and J. Dinwiddy (ed.), Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (L., 1988); cf., in general, Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Ox., 1995). 13 14

62


role as an important official contrivance to identify society with the aims of reforming government. Prominent among the apostles of such patriotism in Austria was a leading adviser to both Maria Theresa and Joseph whom we shall also encounter again, more than once: Joseph von Sonnenfels, whose Ueber die Liebe des Vaterlandes appeared in Vienna in 1771. It contains a vigorous, though rhetorical appeal for civic responsibilities to be shouldered by all ranks of society.17 Yet this development of patriotism did not, of course, simply take the form of a governmental initiative. ‘Patriotic societies’ sprang up more or less spontaneously from the early eighteenth century all over Germany.18 They went with significant concerns of the Aufkla¨rung: to discover and influence the common people; to measure and harness resources; above all to emancipate and validate the vernacular tongue. Suddenly and dramatically a ‘modern’ German language and literature took shape, in hardly more than a generation between the 1750s and 1770s, and not by accident did their emergence coincide with a number of influential writings on the subject of national characteristics, bearing titles like Von dem Nationalstolze (1758), Vom Tode fur das Vaterland (1761), and Vom deutschen Nationalgeist (1765). The author of this tract on ‘Death for the Fatherland’, the precocious and short-lived Thomas Abbt, helped initiate a genre of reflection on public service to Germany, and an identification of Frederick of Prussia as a German hero. Soon the most important theorist of enlightened patriotism appeared on the scene, in the person of the young Johann Gottfried Herder, who—a strong admirer of Abbt—devoted one of his earliest treatises to the question: Haben wir noch jetzt das Publikum und Vaterland der Alten?19 Suffice it for these purposes to identify two tensions to which the development of patriotism gave rise. First came the tension with Frenchified—rococo, if you wish—courtly traditions. That was evident from the beginning; thus the new literary movement consciously sought to break with the universalist, Frenchdominated models of the earlier eighteenth century which had reached their apotheosis in Gottsched.20 But it assumed curious forms: our author on ‘national pride’ was actually a Swiss physician equally at home in French and German; 17 See below, p. 138; cf. Ernst Wangermann in Joseph von Sonnenfels, ed. H. Reinalter (V., 1988), 157–69. 18 R. Vierhaus (ed.), Deutsche patriotische und gemeinnu ¨ tzige Gesellschaften (Mun., 1980). 19 Christoph Prignitz, Vaterlandsliebe und Freiheit: Deutscher Patriotismus von 1750 bis 1850 (Wiesbaden, 1981); John G. Gagliardo, Reich and Nation: The Holy Roman Empire as Idea and Reality, 1763–1806 (Bloomington, 1980), 53 ff.; Jo¨rg Echternkamp, Der Aufstieg des deutschen Nationalismus, 1770–1840 (Frankfurt a.M., 1998), 41 ff.; Benjamin W. Redekop, Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public (Montreal, 2000); HansMartin Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2000). Herder’s Schulrede on ‘Do We Still Have the Public and Fatherland of the Ancients?’: Fru¨he Schriften, 1764–72, ed. U. Gaier (Frankfurt a.M., 1985), 40–55. 20 Gonthier-Louis Fink in Tradition, Norm, Innovation: Soziales und literarisches Traditionsverhalten in der Fru¨hzeit der deutschen Aufkla¨rung, ed. W. Barner (Mun., 1989), 33–67. Cf. Eric A. Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–75 (Camb., 1959).


63

while Herder’s ‘fatherland’ in 1765 did not even lie on the territory of the Empire. He saluted on the one hand the city of Riga; on the other, as his wider patria, the Russia of Catherine the Great. Secondly we should note the tension for governments faced by this first cult of some kind of Deutschtum. No authority took that challenge in its stride. Not even Prussia, which towards the end of the century, after the notoriously Francophile personal tastes of Frederick II, fell back under Frederick William II into reaction against the Enlightenment; certainly not Saxony, whose progressive Lutheran intellectuals were alienated from Catholic rulers embroiled in their unedifying political game in Poland; and not lesser territories like Wu¨rttemberg, whose Duke Karl Eugen joined the patriotism debate by observing ‘Fatherland? I am the Fatherland.’21 Yet at least German states could project themselves as manageable, respectable parts of one Teutonic Kulturnation. The foundation of regular academies, first in Berlin, then in a number of other centres including conservative Bavaria, demonstrated the point (even if, at the end of Frederick the Great’s reign, still only seven out of eighteen Prussian academicians were German).22 Against this background the Austrian dilemma becomes apparent. Her increasing political separation from the rest of Germany, which we have already encountered, now became awkwardly counterbalanced by the dynasty’s more intimate association with German culture. Joseph II especially began promoting the language at all levels, and not just as an administrative medium: for a time he personally directed the court theatre which in the early 1770s replaced the French players, a highly meaningful gesture if we consider the status of theatre as a meeting point between the native traditions of Viennese popular entertainment and the high-flying literary-edificatory endeavours of a Lessing or Schiller. As the latter put it in 1784: ‘If we have a national theatre, then we shall be a nation’; and Joseph actually rechristened his troupe the ‘Hof- und Nationaltheater’.23 There seems no denying that ‘Germanization’, however neutrally or ‘Austrianly’ conceived by ruler or government, served to isolate the authorities from important regional interest groups at home, without (re)building a real bridge to the rest of the Reich. Thus, on the one hand, the ideology of an Austrian identity, despite certain antecedents—notably a tract in political economy by Philipp Wilhelm von ¨ sterreich u¨ber alles, wenn es nur will, first Ho¨rnigk with the programmatic title O 21 T. J. Reed, ‘Talking to Tyrants: Dialogues with Power in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 63–79, qu. at 64. 22 Adolf Harnack, Geschichte der ko ¨n. preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. i (Berlin, 1900). For a spirited argument that Frederick II did in fact promote German culture: T. C. W. Blanning in Royal and Republican Sovereignty, ed. Oresko et al., 527–50, and id., Culture of Power, 194 ff. passim. F. Hartmann and R. Vierhaus (ed.), Der Akademiegedanke im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Bremen, 1977). For Bavaria, esp. Ludwig Hammermayer, Gru¨ndungs- und Fru¨hgeschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Kallmu¨nz, 1959). 23 Theatergeschichte O ¨ sterreichs, vol. x (Graz, 1984); Hilde Haider-Pregler and Herbert Zeman in ¨ sterreich im Europa der Aufkla¨rung, ed. Plaschka and Klingenstein, 701–41. Cf. also Echternkamp, O Aufstieg, 118–33. For the linguistic issue, cf. my ‘Language and State-Building: The Case of the Habsburg Monarchy’, AHY, 35 (2004), 1–24, at 6–8.

64


published at the very outset of our period—remained cramped by the lack of any distinctively Austrian cultural development and debilitated by the rise of the new, essentially north German and Protestant literary models and forms of expression. Hence the absence of any Habsburg academy foundation in the eighteenth century, despite a number of proposals since the time of Leibniz, is no accident; nor is the fact that the prime movers in Vienna’s German literary undertakings were both, in their very different ways, outsiders in family and intellectual background. Joseph himself, the cosmopolitan princeling, and Sonnenfels, the converted Moravian rabbi’s son, alike looked to the ideal of a purified Germanic culture, not least since they had plenty of experience of an unrefined amalgam of several others.24 Meanwhile, on the other hand, they gave a powerful stimulus to the nurture of rival vernaculars and local cultures in the Habsburg lands. The Hungarian case, from the first stirrings of national awareness among members of the newly founded noble Bodyguard in Vienna to the beginnings of Magyar-language theatre by the 1790s, was the most immediate and explosive—but Hungary had hardly been assimilated politically anyway.25 The Bohemian case proved equally important for the future, and is still more revealing. In Prague, a circle around the critic Karl Heinrich Seibt led the way with a squarely Teutonic mission: to demonstrate that Bohemians were also full members, not just of the Austrian ‘state’, but of the German patria. As a reaction against that tendency, other intellectuals began to bethink themselves of a more distinctively Bohemian patriotism—again a theatre movement, around Count Nostitz in the 1780s, was important—and then progressively to rediscover Czech values too.26 Much about this subject of identifying ‘Austria’ or ‘Austrianness’ remains obscure. Even though we now know something of the (diverse and sometimes discrepant) ¨ sterreich’ and ‘o¨sterreichisch’, it appears that contemporary usage of the terms ‘O their cognates in neighbouring languages (osztra´k, rakousky´, etc.) still occurred only sporadically—whereas there was no regular word at all to convey the notion of a non-Austrian German. Nor is it evident why in the Vorma¨rz decades of the earlier nineteenth century Austro-German literary creativity suddenly took off (as did, inter alia, an Austrian academy)—by which time it was already too late for it to achieve cultural hegemony within the Monarchy.27 24 Kopetzky, Sonnenfels; Sonnenfels, ed. Reinalter, passim; William O. McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1989), 36–8; Edith Rosenstrauch¨ sterreich im Europa der Aufkla¨rung, ed. Plaschka and Ko¨nigsberg and James van H. Melton in O Klingenstein, 895–941. 25 Introduction in Ives, Enlightenment and National Revival, esp. 91 ff.; Sa ńdor Csorba, Bessenyei Gyo¨rgy vila´ga (Bp., 2000). 26 Eugen Lemberg, Grundlagen des nationalen Erwachens in Bo ¨hmen (Reichenberg, 1932); Myl’nikov, Vznik na´rodneˇ osvıćenske´ ideologie, esp. 169 ff. 27 On the terminology, see Grete Klingenstein, ‘The Meanings of ‘‘Austria’’ and ‘‘Austrian’’ in the Eighteenth Century’, in Royal and Republican Sovereignty, ed. Oresko et al., 423–78. Cf., for


65

Two further essential components of this Aufkla¨rung cultural transformation now call for our attention. The first is its strenuous pursuit of religious tolerance. Toleration undermined the key postulate of baroque confessional absolutism, and evidently formed part of a whole new critique of religious establishments at home and abroad. But it was also a precondition for the new view of citizenship. ‘Patriotism and religion’, observed Tocqueville, ‘are the only two motives in the world that can long urge all the people towards the same end.’28 Whatever the motives of the populace at large, those of their governors were not necessarily progressive or free of arrie`re penseé on the issue of tolerance. The Habsburgs’ advisers, often influenced by Jansenist attacks on the Catholic hierarchy, pressed it in order to strengthen the church by purging it of outdated attitudes; and it was energetically sponsored by Joseph—against the objections of Maria Theresa—apparently for the same reason. His ultimate purpose seems to have been the vision of a unified state church on a single ecclesiastical and spiritual base, bringing Protestant or Orthodox believers, and probably Jews too, into the open prior to reconciling them; just as the north-German Lutheran variant of the process had its own markedly pragmatic and proselytizing aim. Such toleration in service of a larger end evoked a deep response in the Aufkla¨rung psyche, as Herder’s appeal to Joseph indicates: ‘Give us what we are thirsting for—one German Fatherland, one law, one fine language, and one decent religion.’29 Indeed, the clerical contribution to the Enlightenment remained very substantial all over Germany, whether from Lutheran pastors like Herder, or especially in Catholic areas, where the universities, though still dominated by teachers in religious orders, were transformed during the second third of the century. As we saw previously, a high proportion of the authors writing in Austria in the 1770s, including those who supported liberal causes, were priests; and they played a prominent role in some freemasonic lodges.30 Yet the most distinctive and instructive case within the Habsburg lands is that of Hungary’s substantial minority of Protestants, the prime beneficiaries of the Toleration edict of 1781, whose late eighteenth-century culture represents a unique blend of some later evidence, R. J. W. Evans, ‘Austrian Identity in Hungarian Perspective: The Nineteenth Century’, Austrian Studies, 5 (1994), 27–36. Sometimes the locution ‘uno¨sterreichisch’ was employed: cf. the discussion in Leslie Bodi, Tauwetter in Wien: Zur Prosa der o¨sterreichischen Aufkla¨rung, 1781–95 (Frankfurt, 1977), esp. 63 ff. ‘Reichsdeutsche(r)’ is, of course, a later expression. 28 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. Reeve (2 vols., New York, 1945), i. 97. 29 O’Brien, Ideas of Religious Toleration. Karniel, Toleranzpolitik, 243–310, 378–474, for the Jews; Klingenstein, ‘Modes of Religious Tolerance’. Cf. the Hamburg Religionsedikt discussed in Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Camb., 1985). Herder is cited, with many other contemporary observations on Joseph, by Friedrich Engel-Jańosi ¨ IG, 44 (1930), 224–46, and in Zeitschrift des Vereins fu¨r Geschichte der Stadt Wien, in MO 11 (1931), 53–72, at 54. Standard Catholic disapproval of Joseph is mobilized in Maass (ed.), Der Josephinismus. 30 For the universities, see in general Notker Hammerstein, Aufkla ¨ rung und katholisches Reich. Cf. above, pp. 52 ff. (De Luca). Wehrl, ‘Der ‘‘neue Geist’’ ’.

66


Austrian traditions, which they imbibed under dynastic aegis, and north German ones, which they assimilated through university and ecclesiastical channels. Full civic rights allowed them to become far more conspicuous in public: whether Transylvanian Saxons, above all the fascinating bon-viveur but pertinacious Lutheran, Samuel Brukenthal, already flying high in Maria Theresa’s Vienna; or Magyar Calvinist administrators like Teleki and Podmaniczky; or the handful of Lutheran ministers who would begin to assert a Slovak secular identity by the end of the century.31 Toleration formed part—or so I argued earlier—of a Counter-CounterReformation in Austria, which looked back to pre-baroque arrangements, among them precisely the rehabilitation of Protestant traditions. As such it belonged within the larger historical consciousness cultivated by the Aufkla¨rung. Again this is a facet brought into much clearer focus—at least for Germany— through recent work.32 The central-European Enlightenment developed a profounder understanding of the past, a more critical view of authenticity, a more serious pedagogical approach; leading representatives occupied chairs of history at the universities. But the resultant scholarship was certainly not neutral: in particular, it frequently aligned itself with the newly asserted identities of individual states (overlapping thereby with the work of commentators on imperial public law, ever on the lookout for precedents).33 And it could readily be harnessed by rulers. Good examples in the Habsburg lands are the writings of Adam Franz Kolla´r, van Swieten’s successor as court librarian, a capable savant who possessed a large collection of historical books, but also an enthusiastic propagandist for the dynasty’s rights in Hungary and Poland; and of Baltazar Krcˇelic´, canon of Zagreb, who performed the same function in respect of Maria Theresa’s claims on South Slav territory.34 Of course, the relationship was a mutual one. Thus the works of Muratori and his Austrian and German followers had their independent part in steeling the resolve of secular rulers to initiate campaigns against the privileges of the church. Moreover it remained, particularly in the Austrian case, an unstable and unpredictable one: historiography could rapidly tend to reinforce regional patriotisms, just as the interest in vernacular languages did. Thus—to cite Bohemian instances again—the impeccably loyalist soldier, Count Kinsky, in his 31 Survey in Kosa ´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, esp. 396 ff., 424 ff., 462 ff., 485 ff. For the Saxons: Go¨llner and Staˇnescu (ed.), Aufkla¨rung; for the Slovaks: Ludwig [Lajos] Gogola´k, Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des slovakischen Volkes., vol. ii: 1790–1848 (Mun., 1969), 11 ff. 32 e.g. Notker Hammerstein, Jus und Historie: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an deutschen Universita¨ten im spa¨ten 17. u. 18. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 1972); H. E. Bo¨deker (ed.), Aufkla¨rung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen, 1986). 33 Michael Stolleis in Tradition, Norm, Innovation, ed. Barner, 1–13; Mack Walker, Johann Jakob Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981). 34 On Kolla ´ r, see above, pp. 24, 29. For his library, see Catalogus praestantissimorum librorum . . . Bibliothecae Kollarianae (V., 1783). On Kerchelich/Kercselics/Krcˇelic´, see below, ch. 8, n. 33.


67

treatise on the education of a gentleman, having pronounced on the correct kinds of shoes, socks, food, and so forth, ends with a peroration about the merit, in Bohemians like himself, of studying Bohemian history; whereas the popular chronicle by Frantisˇek Martin Pelcl, compiled for ‘young people’ (die angehende Jugend) and the ‘peasant’ (Landmann), and designed to root out ‘fables, mere opinions and suppositions, prejudices and superstition’ also set itself to serve a ‘patriotic need’, and began by the 1790s to act as a focus for Czech aspirations.35 Toleration and historiography had something of a link in the simultaneous process of humanist revival. As is well known, the European neoclassical movement was led, on an academic front, by scholars at the northern German universities, and it shared common ground with the Greek aesthetic developed by Winckelmann, another vastly influential initiative of the mid-eighteenth century. Together they permitted, in some degree, a reassertion of universal values, though in unmistakably German dress, as most famously with Goethe. In the south of the Reich too, aspects of the Renaissance and, behind it, of the ancient world were rediscovered, but often in the context of their local intellectual associations and relevance. The patriotism of Sonnenfels, mentioned before, revolves around notions of classical virtue and civic responsibility (and deserves examination in the light of the contemporary west-European and American debate about such ideas, as well as of Herder’s conception of the ancient and the modern Vaterland). Others devoted themselves to the collection of texts, for example Count Ka´roly Reviczky, Joseph II’s ambassador in London and Warsaw, one of the great classical bibliophiles of the age.36 We should bear in mind, in assessing the significance of this facet of the culture of the Habsburg dominions, that we are dealing, not just with learned Latin revival, but with a degree of everyday Latin survival unmatched elsewhere in Europe, except at Rome. As an administrative language, and in certain branches of literary composition, Latin continued to be quite widely employed, especially in Hungary.

What, very briefly, were the implications of the foregoing for the social foundations of culture? The ideal of advanced eighteenth-century reformers comprised some form of ‘civil society’, a phrase whose German equivalent, bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft, was by the end of the period just beginning its career and generating calques in the other vernaculars of the region. For an Austrian voice we may turn to the younger van Swieten, Gottfried, son of Gerard, another vigorous exponent of the new parlance of government: ‘It is an undoubted, 35 [Kinsky], Erinnerungen u ¨ ber einen wichtigen Gegenstand, esp. 201 ff.; F. M. Pelzl [Pelcl], Neue Kronik von Bo¨hmen (Pr., 1780), esp. Preface. Cf., for Austria, Khautz, as above, ch. 3, n. 40, and ¨ G, 71 (1963), 140–56. Hans Wagner, ‘Historische Lektu¨re vor der Franzo¨sischen Revolution’, MIO 36 K. Reviczky (comp.), Bibliotheca Graeca et Latina, complectens auctores fere omnes Graeciae et Latii veteris (Berlin, 1784). This library later passed via the Spencers of Althorp to Manchester: cf. A. Lister in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 71, no. 2 (1989), 67–86.

68


indeed a fully demonstrated proposition that a bu¨rgerliche Gesellschaft is distinguished from a horde of savages only through its principles of association, which are anterior to all other cultural progress: viz, that there exists no right (Recht), without obligation and no obligation without right.’37 Yet such a society, in the eyes of most Aufkla¨rer, would remain thoroughly sta¨ndisch, several ‘orders’ or levels surviving in it as distinct entities, as should religious groups once their toleration was assured. Sonnenfels’s ‘nation of patriots’ seems to be construed on these lines. At the top, of course, stood the wealthiest landed nobles, who would, once suitably prepared for their station, bear not a lesser, but a greater burden of public responsibility, and a corresponding share in public esteem, if culture and government really joined hands. It is surely a myth that any absolutist ruler in the eighteenth century despised the aristocracy as such, at least as a maxim of state; certainly not Joseph II (for all the occasional petulant remarks, divorced from their context) or the theorists of his reforming administration. Consider Lombardy, where two of the most original minds in the Habsburg Monarchy, Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, preached the virtues of the cultivated, public-spirited landlord. Or Bohemia, where aristocrats around Count Nostitz combined bureaucratic involvement with agricultural innovations and sponsorship of literary and artistic activities. At the new Burgtheater in Vienna, a majority of the seats were reserved to the nobility.38 A somewhat parallel role fell to the officer corps in the imperial army, massively expanded at mid-century, and increasingly subject to the direct control of the state. Regiments assumed a common uniform, schwarzgelb colours, and the celebrated ‘k. k.’ terminology in the 1740s; from 1766 the hussar’s sabre first carried the arms of the ruler rather than those of his proprietor.39 Although the matter needs proper study, it seems safe to assert that senior military men, almost all of them aristocrats either old or new, represented a prime vehicle for cultural diffusion in Central Europe, from the Prince Eugene circle to noted Aufkla¨rer like Kinsky or the Prince de Ligne. They also contributed a particularly significant number of Freemasons. Beneath the nobility, indeed overlapping with its lower echelons, a larger middle class was in process of formation, especially as officialdom expanded during the eighteenth century, in lesser degree through the invigoration of trade and industry. Whereas the successful bureaucrat could expect a predicate— under Maria Theresa this stratum provided 38 per cent of those ennobled—he did not owe such mobility to the educational purposes of the Aufkla¨rung. 37 Cited in Ernst Bruckmu ¨ sterreichs (V., 1985), 320. Cf. Ernst Wanger¨ ller, Sozialgeschichte O mann, Aufkla¨rung und staatsbu¨rgerliche Erziehung: Gottfried van Swieten als Reformator des o¨sterreichischen Unterrichtswesens, 1781–91 (V., 1978). 38 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. v, pt.1 (Turin, 1987); Daniel M. Klang, ‘Reform and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy’, Canadian Journal of History, 19 (1984), ¨ sterreich im Europa der Aufkla¨rung, ed. Plaschke and Klingenstein, 39–70; Hilde Haider-Pregler, in O 701–16, at 715 (Burgtheater). 39 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 297 ff.; Bruckmu ¨ ller, Sozialgeschichte, 329 (sabres).


69

Joseph II made no bones: ‘Nothing must be taught to the young people which they will later need only rarely, or not in the interests of the state, since university studies are essentially for the training of civil servants, not of scholars.’40 However, since he actually reduced the numbers of those servants, in order to save money, he thereby deprived himself of the necessary cadres to back his reforms. Bu¨rger were to observe their place, and culture should confirm that acceptance. As Count Pergen, Joseph’s minister of police, tidily put it: ‘A state in which enlightened subjects acknowledge and fulfil their duties of conviction . . . will face fewer uprisings and need to issue fewer laws and commands.’ Austrian government had much to learn in this last regard; yet excellent explorations of educational policies and the rise of the Bildungsbu¨rgertum in Central Europe have now revealed the nature of the Aufkla¨rung’s campaign to manage the intellectual and social aspirations of the third estate. Even the brotherhood of Freemasons had its limits: whereas English nobles, it is alleged, removed their swords on entering a lodge, Austrian bourgeois were lent one to strap on.41 Nonetheless, tensions continued to grow, particularly the discordance we have already encountered between the values of courts, prelates, and aristocrats, still decidedly French in expression, and the simpler, more nationally defined values of the professional classes. The north German universities did increasingly convey a middle-class ethos, however diffidently and deferentially, as at Schlo¨zer’s Go¨ttingen or Kant’s Ko¨nigsberg. Even in Vienna by the late eighteenth century the salons of the ‘second society’, like that of Hofrat Greiner, father of the hostess and memoirist Caroline Pichler, were bringing together officials and literati, artists and musicians. The very ambiguity of the term ‘Bu¨rger’—at once member of the urban Mittelstand and also Staatsbu¨rger or citizen of the realm—played its part in legitimating the culture of this class as a nascent culture of state.42 The clash between the older beneficiaries of that state and its younger servants was, however, still muffled by their shared mistrust of the common people, pejoratively identified as Po¨bel by the Enlightenment as much as by Lu¨nig in the passage cited earlier. Arguably the Aufkla¨rung, for all its educative mission, actually widened the gulf between learned and popular culture in Central Europe. It did so precisely through the studious, detached interest in folk traditions displayed by its commentators, and their use, even when they wrote 40 Bruckmu ¨ ller, Sozialgeschichte, 253 f.; Joseph quoted by Wangermann, Aufkla¨rung und staatsbu¨rgerliche Erziehung, 25. 41 James van H. Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Camb., 1988), p. xxii (Pergen) and passim; Anthony J. la Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Camb., 1988); cf. earlier Wolf, Schulwesen des Temesvarer Banats. Paul P. Bernard, in EHR, 107 (1992), 732 (swords). 42 Caroline Pichler, Denkwu ¨ rdigkeiten aus meinem Leben, ed. E. K. Blu¨mml (2 vols., Mun., 1914), i. Cf. Hannes Stekl in Ambivalenzen der Aufkla¨rung: Festschrift fu¨r Ernst Wangermann, ed. G. Ammerer and H. Haas (V., 1997), 33–48.

70


in the vernacular, of refined and literary forms far removed—especially in southern Germany—from the demotic speech of ordinary people.43 The campaign to root out superstition was fundamental to the rational character of the Enlightenment, as both a religious and a secular priority. Much of it was conducted on the classic terrain of magic, especially the assault upon witchcraft prosecutions, which only reached their peak in some parts of the Monarchy during the earlier eighteenth century. At an erudite level the attack was mounted in Austria by Gerard van Swieten, by his successor as physician-in-ordinary to Maria Theresa, another Dutchman, Anton de Haen, by the Tyrolean Girolamo Tartarotti, and by other leaders of the intelligentsia; while a stream of writers in the other languages of the area found a common purpose in literature of popular instruction against obscurantism.44 Yet the campaign was massive precisely because it encountered massive obstacles. While learned support for the baroque cultural synthesis melted away after 1740, grass-roots manifestations of it continued to gain ground: the vogue for calvaries (Kalvarienberge) is a good example. An increase in basic literacy probably only encouraged those loyalties in the short term; while enlightened investigations, for all their own studious detachment, might only serve to bring them more effectively into public view. There is an early instance in one of the literary sensations of the 1730s in Central Europe: a series of scholarly disquisitions on Hungarian vampires. Far from laying the supposed ghosts, of course, censorious pedantry actually prepared the ground for one of the most spectacular themes in twentieth-century popular culture.45 The dead weight, even of regular Orthodox religious practice, let alone of such folk belief, frustrated most Habsburg attempts to regulate it; but let us not forget that even in advanced Wu¨rttemberg we find atavistic eschatological tendencies among the extremer contemporary Pietists. A peak of monastic professions in the Austrian lands, and of entrants into the Jesuit order, seems only to have been reached about 1770: while the start of an influx of Jews into the area, some of them 43 Contrast the argument made by Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978). Cf. James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Ox., 1989), 144 ff.; Harro Segeberg, in Dann and Dinwiddy, Nationalism, 137–56. One of the earliest examples was Friedrich Friese, Historische Nachricht von den merkwu¨rdigen Ceremonien der Altenburgischen Bauern (1703). Cf. Herder’s comment: ‘Even the Volk is not the same. There [among the ancients] this name was honourable: it included all the Bu¨rger . . . now it commonly means the same thing as Po¨bel and canaille: Fru¨he Schriften, 40–55. 44 Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 400–17, surveys the overall phenomenon of witch trials in the area; for their cessation, see E. M. Kern in AHY, 30 (1999), 159–95 (and cf. my ‘Comment’, ibid. 229–35). For Tartarotti: Miriam J. Levy, Governance and Grievance: Habsburg Policy and Italian Tyrol in the Eighteenth Century (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1988), 31 ff. Cf. H. LeC. Agnew in Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich, ed. I. Banac et al. (Boulder, Colo., 1981), 201–36, for Czech and Slovak examples. 45 M. Lehmann, ‘Die Kalvarienberganlagen im Donauraum’, Festschrift Franz Loidl (2 vols., V., 1970), i. 113–59; Ga´bor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (Camb., 1990), 168–88; Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, 1988), 3–9 and passim.


71

touched by Hasidism, introduced a related problem.46 We may recall Joseph’s theatre reform, designed to scotch the vulgar traditions of the Volkstheater: it did not prove very successful in that end.

We have followed through a catalogue of leading themes in the eighteenth century’s cultural transition—the practical and pedagogical impetus, patriotism, toleration, historiography, social ordering, rationality—in order to see how the bearers of Enlightenment in Central Europe were drawn into an ever closer alliance with the forces of the state. In what ways can the fine arts be associated with this analysis? I am unqualified to offer more than a few hints. Evidently the literary and edificatory objectives of the Aufkla¨rung stood in sharp contrast to the sensuality and visual appeal of the Baroque. Did that amount to a real shift of sensibility? How much was it part of Protestant Germany’s sobering influence? In practice we find less of a gap. Some baroque forms and vocabulary survived in the heartlands of the style till the end of the century; while after 1740, as before, a strong programmatic element can be discerned, even if philosophy rather than theology came to dictate it. Again we may consider Sonnenfels, this time as critic of art, urging its practical, useful, moral, national, and above all educational ends, its affinity to learning and literature, its need to be released from the restrictions of guild or creed, to be sustained by the patronage of patriotic nobles and churches.47 There are excellent exemplars in the later career of Franz Anton Maulpertsch, greatest artist of the second half of the century in Austria, and one won over to Sonnenfelsian ideology. The frescoes which Maulpertsch painted in the 1770s at Louka (Klosterbruck), one of Moravia’s wealthy Premonstratensian monasteries, suffered the sad and ironic fate of being effaced within a few years when the house was dissolved on the orders of Joseph II. Thereupon the artist repeated the whole exercise at another Premonstratensian monastery, this time in Bohemia, and created at Strahov, on the commission of its free-thinking abbot, a memorial to the age of Josephinism and Freemasonry. The activity of Chancellor Kaunitz as artistic Maecenas was similarly directed.48 46 Winner, Klosteraufhebungen, shows the continuing strength of traditional Catholicism around Vienna; cf. now Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Camb., 2003), 180 and passim. McCagg, Habsburg Jews, 27 ff. 47 Jir ˇ´ı Kroupa, Alchemie ˇsteˇstı´: Pozdnı´ osvıćenstvı´ a moravska´ spolecˇnost (Kromeˇˇr´ızˇ/Brno, 1986), 150–65; Ernst Wangermann in AHY, 30 (1999), 1–15. 48 Pravoslav Kneidl et al., Strahovska ´ knihovna Pama´tnı´ku na´rodnı´ho pı´semnictvı´: historicke´ sa´ly, deˇjiny a ru˚st fondu˚ (Pr., 1988); [Gregor Norbert Korber], Historische Erkla¨rung der Kalckmahlerey in Freszko, welche in dem ko¨niglichen Stift Bruck an der Taja . . . Anton Maulpertsch . . . verfertigt hat (Znaim, 1778). Hungarian examples in Ge´za Galavics, Program és mu˝alkota´s a 18. sza´zad ve´geń (Bp., 1971); Eniko˝ Buza´si and Anna Ja´vor in A Magyar Nemzeti Gale´ria évko¨nyve (1980–8), 47–58; cf. Kla´ra Garas, Magyarorsza´gi feste´szet a XVIII. sza´zadban (Bp., 1955), 81–153. Jirˇ´ı Kroupa in Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg, ed. Klingenstein and Szabo, 360–81. For a different kind of survival, cf. above, ch. 3, n. 65 (Telesco). On Maulpertsch, see now also Thomas DaC. Kaufmann, Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005).

72


Yet such instances conceal considerable changes in the nature of patronage. The role of the court was sharply reduced throughout the Reich, especially in Austria, where it never substantially recovered from the inverted ostentation of Joseph II (and the comparative frugality of his mother too, which is often overlooked).49 Some good functional building apart—like the Josephinum, an academy for army surgeons, in Vienna—imperial expenditure, and that of the aristocracy as a whole, came to concentrate on music and collections. Contrast the two great princely collectors in eighteenth-century Austria: Eugene of Savoy at the beginning, whose pictures matched his fever of palace construction; and Albert of Saxe-Teschen towards the end, significantly a German outsider as Eugene had been a Franco-Italian one, another military man, but an outstanding progressive landowner and philanthropist rather than a builder or patron.50 It was characteristic of the major aristocratic collections of the Aufkla¨rung— themselves monuments to the rediscovery of history and respect for Renaissance values—that they heralded a fresh era in both social and communal terms. By the next generation they would become a focus for the new middle-class public and for new national ambitions, as in Bohemia and Hungary. Indeed, these considerations announced themselves already with the self-made Brukenthal: his thousand and more paintings, 16,000 books, 17,500 coins, mineral cabinets, etc. (though not perhap the forty-nine kinds of wine in his cellars) were all made over for the benefit of his fellow Saxon burghers of Transylvania.51 They announced themselves too, in a broader way, in the tastes of the rising officialdom of the cities and of the professional classes generally, at once the subjects and the purchasers of the more intimate moralizing and genre pictures of the last decades of the century (a notable practitioner in Berlin was Daniel Chodowiecki), which they acquired through new large-scale art distributors, especially the firm of Artaria based in Vienna.52

After 1789 our cosy world of moderately reformist, but acquiescent and orderly public service, like the rest of Central Europe’s ancien re´gime, was thrown into turmoil. It underwent testing and remoulding in the revolutionary and Napoleonic age, a much more direct challenge than Louis XIV’s earlier, or the 49 Elisabeth Kova ćs, ‘Kirchliches Zeremoniell am Wiener Hof des 18. Jahrhunderts im Wandel ¨ StA, 32 (1979), 109–42. Dickson, Finance and Government, von Mentalita¨t und Gesellschaft’, MO ii. 108, estimates that court expenditure fell to c.7% of the total Austrian budget under Maria Theresa and less than 2% under Joseph. Cf. now Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Camb., 2003), 196, 210–12, and passim. 50 Barbara Dossi, Albertina: The History of the Collection and its Masterpieces (Mun./L., 1999). 51 Schuller, Bruckenthal, ii. 255 ff., 283 ff. Cf. above, ch. 2, n. 6. 52 Artaria: Hedwig Szabolcsi in Intellectuels franc ¸ais, intellectuels hongrois, XIIIe–XXe sie`cles, ed. J. le Goff and B. Ko¨peczi (Bp./Paris, 1985), 159–64. Chodowiecki: W. Busch in Tradition, Norm, Innovation, ed. Barner, 315–43; E. Hinrichs and K. Zernack (ed.), Daniel Chodowiecki, 1726–1801: Kupferstecher, Illustrator, Kaufmann (Tu¨bingen, 1997); U. Fuhrich-Grubert and


73

Turks’ before that. Even the limited common purpose of a century earlier proved unattainable, and Kultur, while its universalist traditions were once again stimulated by events without, found itself spreadeagled and splintered within. The foremost victim was the Habsburg Monarchy, which failed either to assert leadership in the Reich or to sustain domestic momentum. Now the hopes of a Wagner as of a Ho¨rnigk came to ruin amid ill-managed diplomacy, supineness, and recrimination. In 1806 a representative of Emperor Francis II proclaimed the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire from the balcony of the church Am Hof in Vienna, a church with the exquisitely baroque dedication to ‘the nine choirs of angels’, whose own eighteenth-century history rehearses the whole development we have been pursuing: from municipal headquarters of the Jesuits, the conventual building was turned after their dissolution into a war ministry, hub of Joseph’s programme of state formation; while the same balcony staged the highlight of the papal visit of 1782 when Pius VI, seeking to reverse the transformation of the Austrian church, pronounced his benediction over the massed crowds of the faithful.53 Moreover, by 1806 the government had lost confidence in its own cultural ambitions, in the Josephinist ideal of patriotism, in such a degree of selfdefinition as the Monarchy had yet been able to generate. The gifted, but lugubrious and dyspeptic Archduke Charles, younger brother of the Emperor, uttered a cri de cœur: ‘In the arts and sciences . . . the Austrian Monarchy lies more than a century behind other states. . . . It needs only a push from without or a convulsion from within to bring about its complete collapse.’54 That estimate appears wild and ungenerous—some observers were much impressed by the new levels of intellectual activity in the Habsburg lands—and it does not chime in well with the Archduke’s simultaneous verdict that precisely ‘a highly dangerous ratiocination (Vernu¨nfteln) about human rights and constitutions’ had precipitated revolution in France.55 Either you need ideas or you do not! But his remarks do reveal, alongside a historical perspective on the state of civilization or backwardness which would hardly have been adopted a hundred years before, a clear sign of recognition of official, governmental responsibility for culture, that source of so many opportunities and liabilities in the future. Eighteenth-century Central Europe witnessed the crucial stage in the replacement of court-based by state-based culture. The Habsburg Monarchy had represented a classic example of the former, but its attempt to adapt to the latter foundered on the problematic character of Austrian statehood. Clearly there J. Desel (ed.), Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801): Ein hugenottischer Ku¨nstler und Menschenfreund in Berlin (Bad Karlshafen, 2001). 53 Richard Groner (comp.), Wien wie es war (V./Leipzig, 1922), 173–5. 54 Erzherzog Carl von Oesterreich, Ausgewa ¨ hlte Schriften (7 vols., V./Leipzig, 1893–4), v. 549–604, at 549, 603. For later stages of this ‘patriotism’ debate, cf. my ‘Josephinism, ‘‘Austrianness’’, and the Revolution of 1848’, in Austrian Studies, 2 (1991), 145–60. 55 Erzherzog Carl, Schriften, v. 550. Andres, Carta a su hermano, 26–9; Alma Mater Carolina Pragensis: Charles University and Foreign Visitors, ed. J. Polisˇensky´ et al. (Pr., 1988), 94.

74


was some failure of encouragement and direction from above: dynastic and aristocratic patronage lived on only in an attenuated way into the age of neoclassicism, where it inspired little genuine creativity outside the realm of music. It was supplemented by educational and literary modes of influence and control; but these advanced very hesitantly, finding themselves crippled by lack of Austrian or imperial institutional identification, by the clumsy workings of the censorship, and by the ultimate irreducibility of absolutism. Equally important, perhaps, was an inadequate self-awareness on the part of educated society: the absence in Austria of that kind of middle-class consciousness which contributed so much to cultural change further north. The noble and clerical ethos in the Habsburg lands was only slightly diluted by challenges from officialdom or army, still less from the urban milieu; the rapid development of Vienna into a metropolis yielded no corresponding coherence of identity. Josephinism stunted creativity on the whole, confirming intellectual provincialism at a vital juncture; and Austria could not capitalize adequately on rising levels of general Bildung. Her isolation from Sturm und Drang, the cult of sensibility, and their derivatives proved convenient for the government in the short run, but by the early nineteenth century it yielded bitter fruit: having failed to bind the people to itself under the aegis of enlightened reform—as Gebler demands in the quotation cited above—the multinational Monarchy of the age of Metternich had desperately to defend itself from Romantic notions of the Volk and the aspirations, political as well as cultural, of its Vo¨lker.

5 The Habsburg Monarchy and Bohemia, 1526–1848 Why was the kingdom of Bohemia on the whole so tractable a possession of Habsburg rulers during this period? Part of the reason lay, of course, in the failure of the famous revolt of 1618–20, with its termination at the battle of the White Mountain. This essay, the only one in the book to focus squarely on the historic Czech/Bohemian state, takes a correspondingly broad sweep, beginning with the background to that confrontation, which terminally weakened the ancestral institutions of rule there. Yet Austrian authority had its domestic supports before that date, while significant local forces continued to mediate between court and country thereafter. Most important was a process of symbiosis whereby in the eighteenth century Bohemia, besides remaining the material powerhouse of the expanded Monarchy, supplied personnel for much of its overall political, administrative, and intellectual leadership. After 1800 the underpinnings of that alliance began to shift; but only in the revolution of 1848 was their full debility suddenly revealed. It became apparent in the disgrace of absolutism that newer liberal and national ideas drew heavily on those pre-White Mountain values which the Habsburgs and their Bohemian lieutenants had sought to exorcize.

In 1526, when sovereignty over the lands of St Wenceslas passed by election to Ferdinand I of Habsburg, no one could have predicted which party would predominate, the ruler or his subjects.1 The kingdom of Bohemia formed one of the prime political and economic constituents of late medieval Europe. With its core territory of Bohemia proper, looking nationally and administratively to the capital city of Prague as its focus, and the associated lands of Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia, it possessed a population of some three million (more than lived in contemporary England) and extensive resources. These included the rich Originally printed in Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe, ed. M. Greengrass (London: Arnold, 1991), 134–54. 1 Only a skeletal annotation for such a long period is possible in the context of this chapter. For summaries of the whole period, with good bibliography, see K. Richter and G. Hanke, Handbuch der Geschichte der bo¨hmischen La¨nder, ed. K. Bosl, vol. ii: 1471–1848 (Stuttgart, 1974); Jaroslav Pursˇ and Miroslav Kropila´k (ed.), Prˇehled deˇjin Cˇeskoslovenska, vol. i, part 2: 1526–1848 (Pr., 1982); Jo¨rg K. Hoensch, Geschichte Bo¨hmens von der slavischen Landnahme bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Mun., 1987). There is nothing remotely adequate in English, though Bohemia in History, ed. M. Teich (Camb., 1998), provides a few leads.

76


farmlands of the Elbe valley and the southern Moravian plain, Silesia’s textiles and flourishing merchant communities, and, above all, the famous silver mines at such places as Iglau/Jihlava, Kuttenberg/Kutna´ Hora, and the new boomtownship of Joachimsthal, which gave its name to the [Joachims]thaler or ‘dollar’. Moreover, Bohemia was often felt to be the central region of the continent in a way which transcended her purely geographical location. A widely circulated sixteenth-century print depicts Europe as a queen with head in Iberia, arms in Italy and Jutland, and dress billowing out eastwards: if Spain represents her crown, Sicily and Denmark her orb and sceptre, Bohemia, symbolized by many-towered Prague, is her heart. By contrast, the Habsburg patrimony in Central Europe before 1526 consisted of a congeries of provinces, stretching irregularly from the Rhine to the Danube, none of them especially distinctive or influential. Several contained towns favoured as residences of the ruling family: Innsbruck, Linz, Vienna, Wiener Neustadt, and Graz. Young Ferdinand, who had just inherited these territories after considerable haggling with his elder brother, Charles V, was only in the initial stages of developing Vienna as his headquarters. That decision would soon be confirmed by the city’s proximity to his new realms of Bohemia and Hungary, where Ferdinand was likewise elected in 1526. But even his simultaneous acquisition of part of Hungary left Bohemia distinctly wealthier than the rest of Ferdinand’s lands; and neither those lands nor their young ruler were yet sustained by any other purpose, myth, or principle of government than the dynastic ambition of the house of Habsburg. The events of 1526 did not anyway seem to call for novel prescriptions from the Habsburgs. Rather they looked like merely a fresh twist to Bohemia’s two long-standing international relationships, with both of which the Austrian dynasty had also been concerned for generations. The first was the country’s position inside the Holy Roman Empire, to which Bohemia still belonged, even though her native Prˇemyslid kings had long ago assured her complete autonomy. Membership of the Reich cut two ways constitutionally: Bohemia’s residual vassalage, particularly in respect of a small but important piece of her western territory around Eger/Cheb, could be set against the king of Bohemia’s status as senior imperial elector. Practically speaking, the implications of the settlement of a large number of Germans in Bohemia, forming a substantial proportion of burghers everywhere as well as a majority of the population in Silesia and Lusatia (which had only been joined with Bohemia and Moravia during the fourteenth century) were of far greater importance. The extinction of the Prˇemyslids in 1306 inaugurated a period in which a second kind of international association achieved prominence: the union of crowns between Bohemia and neighbouring lands. Such unions had been successfully pursued, above all, by two dynasties. Beginning inside the Empire, the house of Luxemburg combined sovereignty over Germany with the kingship of Bohemia under the resplendent Charles IV (ruled 1346–78), and his feeble

The Habsburg Monarchy and Bohemia

77

eldest son Wenceslas, and extended it to Hungary as well under the younger son Sigismund, though only for a single year did the last manage to operate as effective ruler of all three realms. Outside the Empire the house of Jagiellon, whose roots lay in Poland (or, more accurately, in Lithuania, joined in a condominium with Poland from 1387), spread to secure the thrones of Hungary, then of Bohemia, combining the latter two after 1490 in the persons of Vladislav II and Louis II. The resultant links with Poland, where the main line of Jagiellons reigned until 1572, remained distant (although the descendants of the earlier Polish house of Piast continued to rule over parts of Silesia). The closer bond with Hungary evidently foreshadowed later developments. As emperors for a time in the later thirteenth century, and uninterruptedly since 1437, the Habsburgs were an international dynasty in their own right, well used to operating in this milieu, and to including Bohemia in their calculations. Rudolf I, the first Habsburg of European standing, built up the power of the family on his crushing defeat of the most prominent Prˇemyslid king of Bohemia, Otakar II, at the battle on the Marchfeld in 1278. He then promptly arranged a double wedding between his children and those of his Bohemian rival. When the male line of Prˇemyslids failed in 1306, Rudolf’s grandson of the same name married the widow of Otakar’s son and made good his claim as king of Bohemia: but for his sudden death the following year, the Habsburgs might then have established themselves permanently in Prague. They came equally close to this objective in the mid-fifteenth century. Emperor Charles IV married two of his daughters to the next generation of Habsburgs; his son Sigismund did the same, so that, in the absence of a male Luxemburg heir, Albert of Habsburg ascended the throne of Bohemia in 1437—as he would those of Germany and Hungary a year later. Again though, the new ruler expired soon afterwards. So did his only son, Ladislav Posthumus, nominal king of Bohemia and Hungary between 1453 and 1457. Meanwhile, however, Albert’s daughter married Casimir of Poland, father of Vladislav II, whose successful claim to Bohemia in 1471 thus rested on his Habsburg blood. In his turn Vladislav was responsible for the double matrimonial alliance with Emperor Maximilian I which, first mooted in 1491, finally took effect in 1521, when Archduke Ferdinand became brother-in-law to the ill-fated King Louis. Such dense genealogical information was necessary in order to indicate the extent of Habsburg involvement in Bohemia before Louis perished at the hands of the Ottomans on the battlefield of Mohaćs. Ferdinand’s formal bid for the vacant throne rested on grants by rulers of the kingdom stretching back to the early fourteenth century, as well as on the rights of his wife, Anna, which had been expressly confirmed by the diet, or estates, of Bohemia in 1510. The estates of the realm could retort that they had not officially approved Anna’s marriage to Ferdinand although such approval had been stipulated by them as essential in 1510. But opposition to the Habsburg claim contained a large element of shadow-boxing. The only realistic rival candidates in 1526, the Polish king and

78


the dukes of Bavaria, were half-hearted, readily warned off by imperial diplomacy and bought out by hand-outs to their supporters from the Habsburgs’ south German bankers, re-enacting on a smaller scale the election of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor seven years before. Ferdinand’s offer to pay off the crown’s debts to its chief citizens struck a similar chord. Besides, the need for firm kingship was reinforced by the recurrent threat of peasant disturbance and by the Turkish advance into Hungary, although Bohemia’s lords had recently done much to permit the latter by their failure to rally in time to their late king’s Mohaćs campaign.2 If the Bohemian political establishment faced Hobson’s choice, then the king whom it duly elected in October 1526 could hardly escape his manifest destiny. In a way, the precedents were attractive: the chance to revive the empire of Charles IV or Sigismund, or of his short-lived Habsburg ancestor, Albert. But the new ruler also inherited a major liability. As he crossed the border into Bohemia through the mid-winter snows, Ferdinand must have reflected uneasily that he was entering the very homeland of heresy—heresy which he was already engaged under oath to sustain. Bohemia’s great expansion under Charles IV had itself nurtured the twin cankers of ecclesiastical abuse and German domination which had given rise to the Hussite revolt. Under the limp hand of Wenceslas it had fermented, especially at the newly founded Caroline University in Prague, around its professor, Jan Hus. Under Sigismund, it exploded into a virulent struggle for a purified national church controlled by laymen, and for its symbol of the chalice, or communion in both kinds (‘sub utraque specie’, hence the designation ‘Utraquism’). Against the odds, the heretic nation had triumphed, and with it Czech culture and a predominantly Czech aristocracy. But Bohemia paid a terrible price in terms of social, ethnic, and regional tensions, and was left debilitated and internationally isolated. Like seventeenth-century England or nineteenth-century France, Bohemia became notorious as the most disordered polity and ungovernable people of the day: the sick heart of the continent, beating to an unsteady rhythm.3

Ferdinand I’s qualities as ruler—his enterprise and ambition, firmness and method—are generally acknowledged. Historians have also tended to stress the 2 The circumstances of the election are related in detail in Josef Jana ćˇek, Cˇeske´ deˇjiny: Doba prˇedbeˇlohorska´ (2 vols., Pr., 1968–84), i; summarily in Kenneth J. Dillon, King and Estates in the Bohemian Lands, 1526–64 (Brussels, 1976). An important analysis of constitutional relations is Joachim Bahlcke, Regionalismus und Staatsintegration im Widerstreit: Die La¨nder der Bo¨hmischen Krone im ersten Jahrhundert der Habsburgerherrschaft (Mun., 1994). The latest survey of the century after 1526 is Bahlcke and V. Dudeck (ed.), Welt, Macht, Geist: Das Haus Habsburg und die Oberlausitz (Zittau, 2002). 3 The definitive history for our time of the Hussite phenomenon is Frantis ˇek Sˇmahel, Husitska´ revoluce (4 vols., Pr., 1993); also in German as Die Hussitische Revolution (3 vols., Hanover, 2002). Still useful as an introduction: id., La Re´volution hussite: une anomalie historique (Paris, 1985).


79

significance of the fact that he came to Bohemia as a stranger. That argument is less persuasive. Certainly the Hussite legacy attached its own dimension of foreignness to those who were not Utraquist and spoke no Czech. It was also important that Ferdinand was often absent from Bohemia in his Austrian (and Hungarian) lands. On the other hand, many native Bohemians were Catholic and used German, like Ferdinand himself, who at least made sure that his sons should learn Czech. As to absentee rule, the recent example of the Jagiellons showed that this regularly signified weak, rather than strong government. What mattered most was that the new Habsburg monarch aimed specifically to emulate the energetic domestic rulers of Bohemia’s past—Charles IV, or the Hussite king, George of Podeˇbrady (or mutatis mutandis Matthias Corvinus of Hungary). Reform and reorganization were to run parallel in Bohemia and in the Austrian (and Hungarian) territories, where Ferdinand, born and bred in Spain, was similarly regarded for a long time as a stranger.4 The Habsburgs’ policy during this first period of their governance of Bohemia thus aimed at a limited dominion in the country rather than full control over it. Faced by the distended expectations of many leaders in the Bohemian estates, whose financial and military support Ferdinand urgently needed, the King’s task was to transform those whom he had already mobilized to support him in 1526 into a genuine court party. To further this objective, he employed various forms of patronage and inducement, above all the appointments to high office. Apart from certain court positions more ceremonial than substantial, these included specifically the posts of Grand Burgrave of Prague, Bohemia’s senior royal lieutenant, and of Chancellor, the keeper of the seals and head of the day-to-day administration. Ferdinand had indeed promised to consult the estates before nominating individuals to such offices (all of them reserved for the nobility), but he found ways of limiting the force of that requirement, the more so in the case of the royal Chamber (Kammer), newly reconstituted in 1527 to manage crown finances. No less crucial to the objectives of Habsburg government were three kinds of major dissension which disconcerted the efforts of its opponents. Immediately upon his accession Ferdinand had the opportunity to exploit inter-provincial rivalries. ‘Inter-provincial’, though, is hardly the mot juste for the severe historical tensions between, on one hand, the kingdom of Bohemia, and, on the other, the margravate of Moravia, together with that motley assemblage of semi-autonomous duchies loosely bound together under the description of Silesia, and the twin northerly margravates of Lower and Upper Lusatia. Bohemia sought to call the constitutional tune, but these other, so-called ‘incorporated’ regions, larger collectively in both area and population, demurred 4 On the early years of Ferdinand’s reign in general see Alfons Lhotsky, Das Zeitalter des Hauses Osterreich: Die ersten Jahre der Regierung Ferdinands I (V., 1971); Paula S. Fichtner, Ferdinand I of Austria: The Politics of Dynasticism in the Age of the Reformation (New York, 1982); Gu¨nther R. Burkert, Landesfu¨rst und Sta¨nde: Karl V, Ferdinand I. und die o¨sterreichischen Erbla¨nder im Ringen um Gesamstaat und Landesinteressen (Graz, 1987).

80


when the Bohemian estates pointedly failed to involve them in the electoral process. They forthwith declared their acceptance of Ferdinand and his descendants as hereditary rulers. The lands of St Wenceslas possessed remarkably little institutional cohesion. ‘General’, or common, diets were vigorously resisted outside Bohemia proper, as was the writ of the Chancellor, the only overall officer of state. Indeed the other provinces acknowledged the authority of their own Land Captain or Landeshauptmann, not that of the Grand Burgrave. Socially, the sole (albeit important) bond consisted in an equal and uniform noble status, such that individual nobles could move around freely and hold office anywhere, provided that they owned land in the province concerned. Intellectually, the dominant Bohemian culture, shaped by the Czech language in its Hussite manifestations, extended through much of Moravia, but hardly at all to Silesia or Lusatia. More alarming was the wide divergence in their external concerns, with Moravia always more inclined to look south and east (Matthias Corvinus of Hungary had ruled Moravia as margrave in the later fifteenth century), whilst Silesia and Lusatia (though they too belonged among Matthias’s conquests) were preoccupied by relations with the Holy Roman Empire as well as—at times—with Poland.5 This clash between Bohemia’s claim to hegemony and the separatist response of the incorporated lands proved, time and again, to be at least as effective as enemies from without in frustrating the best efforts of patriots. It allowed the King to employ two alternating strategies. He could either use Bohemia to press for tighter control throughout the territories (as with the chamber administration of 1527), or else favour the other provinces as a lever against Bohemia (as over regulation of the succession). But within each body of provincial estates he enjoyed hardly less scope, since the divisions everywhere between privileged corporations of lords, knights, and burghers of the royal towns became ever more pronounced in the course of the sixteenth century. In part such divisions were the fruit of Hussite disorders, especially the feuding of over-mighty barons among themselves and with the rest of society (and Ferdinand made valuable capital out of his dismissal in 1530 of the unpopular Grand Burgrave, Zdeneˇk Lev of Rozˇmita´l).6 Increasingly, however, these tensions resulted from new rivalries, particularly over shares in buoyant sectors of the economy like brewing, fish-farming, and the wool trade. Meetings of the Bohemian and other diets were a focus for resistance to the demands of the crown; but they proved to be an equal focus for the disunity of the opposition. The third and most fundamental area of conflict surrounded religion. Fifteenth-century struggles had left large pockets of Catholic survival, an ill-defined and turbid Utraquist mainstream often dominated by lay, not to say 5 These issues deserve more attention than they normally receive; but see the excellent Moravianeye view of Josef Va´lka in Prˇehled deˇjin Moravy, ed. B. Cˇeresˇnˇa´k et al., vol. ii: Stavovska´ Morava, 1440–1620 (Pr., 1987). 6 Winfried Eberhard, Konfessionsbildung und Sta ¨ nde in Bo¨hmen, 1478–1530 (Mun., 1981).


81

worldly, influences, alongside communities of radical sectaries repeatedly outlawed, though in practice usually tolerated. Instead of simplifying this picture, the Protestant Reformation—which of course acknowledged a debt to the Hussite impulse—only complicated it. It introduced further confessional subdivisions and meshed in intricate ways with the existing lines of political fracture.7 Most German-speakers soon gravitated towards Lutheran beliefs propagated from the Empire. Numerous Utraquists did the same, though more guardedly, and without relinquishing their constitutional status. Meanwhile, the chief sect, the Unity of Bohemian Brethren, became increasingly Calvinist, while others espoused Anabaptist and similar tenets. Ferdinand could not stem this tide: the continuing Catholic loyalties of his house left him dangerously isolated. Yet his position offered certain advantages. He stood as a rallying point for the orthodox remnant, which included some powerful noble families. This orthodoxy would prove an attraction to conservative Utraquists, who feared the collapse of all ecclesiastical authority. Most importantly, he offered an obstacle to effective organization by Protestant groups. Operating with considerable pragmatism, he awaited the chance to exploit the unbridled dissensions of his subjects. That chance came in 1546–7 with the outbreak of the Schmalkaldic War in Germany and Ferdinand’s call for the country to assist his brother, Charles V. However fortuitous the circumstances it was entirely predictable not only that more extreme Protestants in Bohemia would take the side of their co-religionists in the Empire, but that the bulk of the estates should hesitate to follow them. By the time a majority had decided to resist the King, the issue was settled in Germany without them, and Ferdinand could retaliate. He instituted tougher measures to discipline the towns, which were the ringleaders of the opposition, and to crush the sects. He established a new court of appeal for all the Bohemian lands. Over the next years he introduced the Jesuit order and revived the archbishopric of Prague, defunct since Hussite times. Yet these policies were not pressed very far or consistently; they still fell far short of lasting confrontation. In Moravia and Silesia, which had remained broadly loyal, liberties were infringed even less.8 The events of 1546–7 possess a further significance for our purposes. It was the first occasion when the wider context of Habsburg politics could be turned to advantage in Bohemia. Previously that context—the costly and disruptive Turkish wars, the obligatory Catholic stance (preventing the launch of some kind of national church), the abortive experiment of general diets—had been, 7 Ibid. and id., Monarchie und Widerstand: Zur sta ¨ ndischen Oppositionsbildung im Herrschaftssystem Ferdinands I. in Bo¨hmen (Mun., 1985), a very important, though somewhat problematical work. Zdeneˇk V. David, Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther (Washington/Baltimore, 2003) now provides a really significant reassessment of the Utraquist tradition. 8 Details of this revolt in Jana ćˇek, Cˇeske´ deˇjiny, ii, and Eberhard, Monarchie und Widerstand; summary in Dillon, King and Estates (n. 2 above).

82


on balance, a drawback. Now close cooperation bore fruit, a process confirmed in 1556 (formally in 1558) when Ferdinand succeeded to his brother Charles V’s title. At the same time, his ‘Austrian’ institutions, the Court Chamber (Hofkammer), Aulic Council (Hofrat), and newly established War Council, became fully-fledged imperial ones. Henceforth Ferdinand enjoyed greater authority to introduce uniform models of government, especially to tighten the financial grip on Bohemia, which yielded over half his revenue, and to employ foreign experts in the Chamber there. Again, however, we must beware of exaggeration. Bohemia’s administration was still quite distinct and, despite the occasional royal prote´ge´, Florian Griespeck for example, who made his career there, the prerequisite of naturalization by the estates (inkola´t) remained difficult to evade. Moreover—a great contrast with the future, as we shall see—practically no Bohemians found advancement in the other direction, across the Austrian border. By the time of his death in 1564, Ferdinand I’s everyday involvement in Bohemia had anyway greatly diminished. From 1548, he installed his second son Ferdinand as a regent governor (Statthalter). When the latter’s elder brother Maximilian (Maximilian II as emperor) succeeded, he restored direct rule and spent long periods in Prague. But Maximilian was less resolute and more tolerant than his father. His twelve-year reign forms essentially an interlude, during which the estates recovered their nerve and developed a modicum of solidarity. After much hard bargaining in 1575, they extracted from the king a verbal promise of security for Protestant worship, which they had subsumed under the awkward umbrella of a single Confessio Bohemica.9 But their opposition was muted, not least because service at the court of the cultivated, opulent, and generous Maximilian afforded many attractions. With the advent of Rudolf II, this aspect of Habsburg–Bohemian relations was vastly enhanced. From 1583 Rudolf, alone among the sovereigns of his dynasty, made Prague his permanent residence. In so doing he reanimated Charles IV’s conception of Bohemia as the focus for the government of the whole Holy Roman Empire, and simultaneously fulfilled one of the main demands of the local estates. Some administrative overlap between the ruler’s domestic and his broader activities was bound to result, but it seems to have stayed irregular and limited, given Rudolf’s touchy personality and fitful, sometimes wayward, conduct of business. Nor did the King, ensconced in his castle on the Hradschin (Czech: Hradcˇany), often intervene directly in Bohemian politics before the end of the century. The dominant aristocratic clans of Rozˇmberk, Pernsˇtyń, Hradec, and the like, continued to hold sway over 9 Newer approaches to this important diet in Alois Mı ´ka, ‘Z boju˚ o na´bozˇenskou toleranci v 16. stoleti’, CˇsCˇH 18 (1970), 371–80; Jaroslav Pańek, ‘Za´pas o charakter cˇeske´ stavovske´ opozice a sneˇm roku 1575’, ibid. 28 (1980), 863–86. Cf. Pańek’s broader study of the opposition, Stavovska´ opozice a jeji za´pas s Habsburky, 1547–77 (Pr., 1982). Wider context in Paula S. Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven, 2001), esp. 188–205.


83

public office, and an uneasy religious truce lived on. Meanwhile the cultural magnetism of the Rudolfine entourage helped to accomplish what the artistic and literary patronage of earlier Habsburgs had already furthered: the reintegration of Bohemia’s nobility and burghers into the world of the European Renaissance and international humanism, from which the aftermath of the Hussite wars had long largely excluded them.10 After 1600, however, a wider crisis of Habsburg affairs entailed correspondingly grave consequences for the Bohemian lands. In Germany, there was religious polarization and constitutional breakdown. In Hungary, unreal plans for the assertion of royal power coincided with another devastating war against the Turks. These problems, along with the Bruderzwist or fraternal feud between Rudolf and his next of kin, disturbed the political balance inside Bohemia. So also did the inception of a semi-official campaign of domestic CounterReformation to which the ailing King lent partial support. Protestant majorities among the various estates were pitched first into opposition. Then, as the bitter struggle between Rudolf and his brother Matthias split the Habsburg camp, they climbed into the saddle. They insisted on written guarantees of religious equality and of full participation in government, those for Bohemia proper being enshrined in the famous ‘Letter of Majesty’ conceded by the embattled Rudolf in 1609.11 What made possible the dramatic discomfiture of the dynasty in the early years of the seventeenth century was the remarkable success of a movement of confederacy among the territories of the Austrian Habsburgs. Once the Bohemian lands had become involved in the broader destiny of Rudolf’s empire, it made obvious sense to seek support beyond their borders, and to ally with malcontents in Hungary and Austria too. The outcome was an ambitious and unique experiment in self-government by the estates on an international scale which both offered a genuine alternative to Habsburg rule and incorporated some markedly progressive constitutional features. Yet the experiment was fraught with problems from the start. First, the two most important oppositional groups did not see eye to eye. A nadir in relations between Bohemian and Moravian Protestants was reached in 1608. They almost came to blows over Prague’s unwillingness to rally to the side of Matthias, and Moravia would return the disfavour in 1618. Besides, it remained extremely difficult for the estates, which (in a real sense and in contrast to the ruler) embodied the separateness of different parts of the crown, to concert their activities in time of need. Lastly, there were pointed disagreements, even among the newly appointed official 10 R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (3rd edn., L., 1984). Latest in the rapidly growing body of literature on Rudolfine culture, especially visual: Thomas DaC. Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago, 1988); Prag um 1600: Beitra¨ge zur Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II. (Freren, 1988); Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II. Katalog der Ausstellung, Essen, 1988 (Freren, 1988); Elisˇka Fucˇ´ıkova´ [et al.], Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City (Pr., 1997). 11 Josef Jana ćˇek, Pa´d Rudolfa II. (Pr., 1973).

84


‘defenders’ of the Protestant cause, about how far disloyalty to the dynasty could or should go.12 The Habsburgs did nothing to accommodate these doubts, and matters came to a head rapidly after Rudolf’s death in 1612. Matthias, anxious to exorcize his brother’s spirit and chasten a rebellious capital, withdrew his court back to Vienna. Then openly partisan actions by the Catholic lieutenants, entrusted with royal government in his absence, provoked the defenestration of two of them from the windows of the Hradschin on 23 May 1618, a messy and inefficient procedure full of Hussite symbolism. This response by Bohemia’s Protestant estates was nevertheless a reluctant one, lacking in real Hussite resonance: not a year earlier, they had accepted without serious protest the notorious CounterReformer, Ferdinand of Styria, as heir to his cousin Matthias. They did not initially seek to break the ties with the Habsburgs completely, even with an army in the field to lend force to their demands. Nor could their behaviour be construed as a Czech patriotic outburst—after all, the victims, Jaroslav Martinic and Vile´m Slavata, were more authentically ‘old-Bohemian’ than several of their accusers. The rebels were now the first to invoke the casus foederis with their confederates abroad and look to help from Germany as well. The events of 1546–7 were about to be replayed in reverse. The Bohemian Revolt was not only a prelude to the Thirty Years War, but a landmark in the evolution of the state structures of Central Europe.13 The crucial constitutional dates which concern us all lie during 1619 and they need to be grasped in their sequence. The death of Matthias on 20 March foreclosed the last chance of compromise. The confederal programme was eventually agreed with Moravia and Silesia on 31 July. Ferdinand was deposed on 19 August, and the elective principle was unilaterally reasserted in favour of Frederick of the Palatinate a week later (just two days before Ferdinand was chosen as emperor). The incompetence of the new monarch, the resulting religious and political frictions, and the failure of Protestant alliances then combined with the effectiveness of a Habsburg fifth column and the very un-Hussite passivity of the population at large to encompass the defeat of the insurrection. We are left to ponder the dramatic irony of Bohemia’s international relationships in these years. The rebels denied her link with the Holy Roman Empire in order to facilitate Ferdinand’s deposition and Frederick’s kingship. Yet they hoped to rely on that same link for support, although most of Germany’s backing actually went, along with the imperial crown, to the Habsburgs. The rebels revived the 12 R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas (ed.), Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (L., 1991); Bahlcke, Regionalismus und Staatsintegration (n. 2 above). 13 See the earlier sections of Josef V. Polis ˇensky´, The Thirty Years War (London, 1971); id. (with F. Snider), War and Society in Europe, 1618–48 (Camb., 1978); G. Parker et al., The Thirty Years War (London, 1984); and—for a domestic Czech view—Frantisˇek Kavka, Bı´la´ Hora a ˇceske´ deˇjiny (Pr., 1962). Hans Sturmberger’s taut narrative in Aufstand in Bo¨hmen: Der Beginn des dreißigja¨hrigen Krieges (Mun., 1959), remains valuable.


85

medieval arrangement of a loose union of thrones; but now as a union for dethronement instead.

The defeat of the forces of revolt on the afternoon of 8 November 1620 upon a featureless tableland called the White Mountain outside the gates of Prague turned into a catastrophe with the precipitate flight of their leaders. It abruptly heralded the next phase in Habsburg relations with Bohemia, a phase which lasted exactly 120 years. Now, for the first time, royal powers could be unequivocally asserted over the estates, and the restored Ferdinand II lost no time in doing so, even while the seismic waves of European disturbance were spreading out from the Bohemian epicentre. For a few years after his comprehensive success the King could wield the authority of a conqueror; and his decisions therefore afford an important insight into the priorities of the dynasty in the crown of St Wenceslas. Totally persuaded that such a military coup must betoken the hand of God, Ferdinand and his advisers sought above all to make Bohemia safe for Catholicism.14 Religious enactments came first and last in those years. Hardly had the dust settled than the most pernicious heretics were forced to leave the country. It is instructive that these included not only Calvinist preachers, many of whom had indeed agitated strongly in the heat of confrontation, but also the harmless communities of Moravian Anabaptists, who practised unqualified pacifism.15 By the end of the 1620s, the government had proceeded by stages to a complete abrogation of the ‘Letter of Majesty’. All Protestant lords and burghers in Bohemia and Moravia, however loyal their record, had to tread the path of exile, while all peasants faced forced conversion. Meanwhile the Catholic prelates regained their rank as the first estate of the realm, 200 years after the Hussites had humbled them. Ecclesiastical lands were reclaimed, or in lieu of that a financial settlement was stipulated. New churches and monasteries began to spring up and the Jesuits laid claim to a dominant role in the purified educational system. In all this, the regime identified heresy as the badge of rebellion, and it took equally firm steps to enforce political obedience in the future. The purely retributive measures were severe enough: not so much the execution of twenty-seven ringleaders (which, however often invoked in Habsburg demonologies, appears mild by the standards of, say, Tudor England), as the widespread confiscation, or at least sequestration, of lands owned by persons implicated, however slightly, in oppositional activity. There followed a package of fundamental changes in which 14 Robert Bireley, Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counter-Reformation: Emperor Ferdinand II, William Lamormaini, S.J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), stresses this element in Ferdinand’s overall policy. Olivier Chaline, La Bataille de la Montagne Blanche: un mystique chez les guerriers (Paris, 1999), is a remarkable attempt to vindicate the spiritual credentials of the White Mountain campaign. Cf. Ivana Cˇornejova´, Tovarysˇstvo jezˇ´ıˇsovo: jezuite´ v Cˇechaćh 15 The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren, i (Rifton, NY, 1987), 633 ff. (Pr., 1995).

86


the intimidated estates perforce acquiesced. The hereditary succession of the house of Habsburg was confirmed. The Bohemian diet lost its right to initiate legislation. New appeal procedures strengthened the hand of the sovereign in the judiciary. Officers of the crown became servants of the king, answerable to him by oath and subject to regular confirmation in post. The monarch also gained control over the procedure of naturalization (inkola´t) which helped him to manipulate the administration further. Finally, and again in the interests of administrative convenience, the German language was declared of equal official status with Czech, a final repudiation of Hussite linguistic priorities which had been reaffirmed as recently as at the diet of 1615.16 These enactments, although cast in the traditional mould of a revised land ordinance (the Verneuerte Landesordnung of 1627), signified a constitutional revolution, to accompany the confessional revolution as Counter-Reformation took hold and the social revolution in which over 50 per cent of landed wealth changed hands. Moreover, the whole operation of the country’s senior executive under the Chancellor now followed the court to Vienna, leaving a Lieutenancy Council, which perpetuated the hated institution of 1618, to hold the fort on the Hradschin for a largely absent ruler. Yet the result—despite another of those hoary legends about the Habsburgs—was no kind of absolutism. In part the very distraction of the dynasty elsewhere limited the effect of its policies in Bohemia. Even in the 1620s much had to be left to a clique of adventurers headed by the Moravian aristocrat, Karl Liechtenstein. These individuals took time off to feather their own nests (Vienna spent decades in a largely abortive attempt to divest Liechtenstein’s heirs of some of his ill-gotten gains). Then the programme was interrupted by the misfortunes of war. Swedes, Saxons, and plenty of exiled natives swarmed into the country in the early 1630s. The Swedes returned to reoccupy many areas throughout the 1640s. After the Westphalian settlement, another disability slowly made itself felt. The supply of male members of the dynasty, and therefore of potential royal administrators, declined almost as disastrously as in the case of the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs. By the mid1660s, the young Emperor Leopold I had to shoulder alone a whole range of burdens, from resisting France in the Rhineland to imposing his will upon malcontents in Hungary. In all empires, of course, provincial mice will sometimes play. A larger reason for the survival in practice of much of Bohemia’s autonomy after 1620 lay in the character of the political elite. This was a very limited group of powerful landed families, which held the reins of domestic authority in church as in state. A few of these families were indeed creatures of the ruler, newly introduced from abroad. Others, like the Dietrichsteins and Liechtensteins, Althans and Harrachs, played a bridging role, with some existing pedigree inside the Bohemian 16 A survey of these developments in Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, chs. 2 and 6. Also Lutz Rentzow, Die Entstehungs- und Wirkungsgeschichte der Vernewerten Landesordnung fu¨r das Ko¨nigreich Bo¨hmen von 1627 (Frankfurt a.M., 1998).


87

lands to set against their Austrian ancestry. However, the names of the rest still sounded a roll-call of noted native clans: Martinic and Slavata (particularly prominent), Lobkowitz and Czernin, Kinsky and Sternberg, Kolowrat, Nostitz, Schlick. But for the hubris of Wallenstein and his Czech friends, whose vastly swollen possessions suffered confiscation in the 1630s, the preponderance of traditional families would have been yet greater. As it was, they continued to call the tune. Their willingness to espouse the essential aims of the Habsburgs and thereby to purge the Protestant, even perhaps insurrectionary, skeletons from many an ancestral cupboard, reaped a rich reward from conservative and preoccupied emperors, grateful to them and their clients for the dutiful and, at times, heroic defence of the country against invasions in the 1630s and 1640s.17 In the hands of this ‘old-new’ oligarchy, Bohemia’s noble estates preserved much of their influence. Diets continued to meet, annually as a rule, and soon recovered the right to make modest representations as well as to argue the toss with their ruler. The chief officials of the king, sitting on the Lieutenancy Council, remained land officers too and were drawn almost exclusively from ancient Bohemian clans. Their functions as transmitters and often modifiers of the royal will gained institutional underpinning from 1714, when a ‘National Committee’ (Landesausschuss, Zemsky´ vy´bor) was established under the Grand Burgrave to coordinate the estates’ activities. Below them, the local administrative structure survived the Verneuerte Landesordnung untouched, much of it serviced by lesser nobles and urban patricians. So also did all other privileges of the Bohemian nation not specifically revoked in 1627. The powers of the estates over taxation, one area of vital concern to the Habsburgs, actually grew. The Thirty Years War brought devastation, depopulation, and stagnation unique in Bohemia’s history. Yet, when the conflict gave way to one of her longest eras of peace and security at home, the country remained the dynasty’s richest resource, still supplying well over half the entire revenue from direct taxation throughout the seventeenth century. The estates jealously guarded their right not only to give formal approval for, but also to assess and collect, ever greater sums. These were usually subdivided in the ratio of five parts from Bohemia proper, three from Silesia, and two from Moravia.18 War ruined the towns for generations, thus both depriving the crown of the opportunity to play them off against the aristocracy, and leaving the latter’s 17 Brilliant new analysis by Petr Mat’a, Sve ˇt ˇceske´ aristokracie, 1500–1700 (Pr., 2004), esp. 67 ff. Cf. Petr Cˇornej, ‘Vliv pobeˇlohorskyćh konfiskacı´ na skladbeˇ feuda´lnı´ trˇ´ıdy’, Acta Universitatis Carolinae, Philosophica et Historica (1976), 1, 165–94; Eila Hassenpflug-Elzholz, Bo¨hmen und die bo¨hmischen Sta¨nde in der Zeit des beginnenden Zentralismus (V., 1982). In deference to the dominant German linguistic culture of Bohemia after 1620, I have spelt most of these surnames in their German form. 18 In the absence of reliable overall statistics, the exact burden borne by Bohemia remains uncertain. But see Jean Be´renger, Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans la seconde moitie´ du XVIIe sie`cle (Paris, 1975), 320 ff.; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii. 185 ff. The income from regalia— crown lands, mines, customs and excise, etc.—is a separate calculation, but one which would not materially affect this conclusion.

88


demesne farming as the only prosperous sector of the economy, especially since the associated tax burden could be largely shifted onto the shoulders of the peasantry. When, after 1700, new manufactures began to confirm Bohemia’s economic leadership within the Habsburg lands, the wealthiest nobles and monasteries were first to develop them.19 In two further respects Bohemia, while being ruled in far from absolute fashion after 1620, could be held in tolerably well-balanced loyalty to the Habsburgs. Provincial particularities diminished hardly at all. With a total disregard for the unity of the crown, the Lusatias were entirely abandoned— ceded to the Lutheran prince of Saxony in the militant 1620s without even a battle! In Silesia the government gained ground in some duchies, but had to allow certain rights to Protestants after 1648 and again after 1707. The installation of a few great Bohemian families as local rulers in parts of Silesia did something to strengthen the Habsburgs’ grip. So did the wider powers now wielded through all the provinces by the Chancery and the Court of Appeal. By the same token, Moravians (rather less rebellious in 1618–20, rather less harshly treated by their own Verneuerte Landesordnung of 1628) tended more than ever to look now to Vienna for their lead, less than ever to make common cause with any Bohemian discontent.20 What politics kept divided, culture did a little to unite. Czech language and Czech literature notoriously suffered, even though this was because of neglect rather than active persecution and did not extend to all domains (in particular not to devotional writing). Nor did they disappear from public life overnight. The Czech language was retained, for instance, at formal sessions of the diet, and the loss of predominantly German Lusatia actually furnished some slight compensation. Yet Bohemian culture, mainly Latinate or visual, flourished, a more harmonious and original achievement than its pre-1620 counterpart. As at that time, it fed on growing international contacts, now redirected towards the sources of Catholic Baroque. And while it came to incorporate some distinctly patriotic features significant for the future, its basically cosmopolitan character allowed educated and adaptable Bohemians easy entreé into a broader Austrian world.21 Here there appeared the crucial corollary of the first stage of Bohemia’s ‘provincialization’: an export of individuals and influence. As the lands of 19 Much detail in Klı ´ma, Manufakturnı´ obdobı´, partly summarized by the author in Historica, 11 (Pr., 1965), 95–119. 20 J. Bahlcke (ed.), Geschichte der Oberlausitz: Herrschaft, Gesellschaft und Kultur vom Mittelalter bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 2001), esp. 143 ff. On Silesia: Bein, Schlesien in der habsburgischen Politik. On Moravia, Josef Va´lka, Deˇjiny Moravy, vol. ii: Morava reformace, renesance a baroka (Brno, 1996). 21 Protracted neglect of the Bohemian baroque has been remedied in (e.g.) Milada Souc ˇkova´, Baroque in Bohemia (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1980); Zdeneˇk Kalista, Tva´ˇr baroka (Mun., 1982); Jan Kucˇera and Jirˇ´ı Rak, Bohuslav Balbıń a jeho mı´sto v ˇceske´ kulturˇe (Pr., 1983); Z. Hoyda (ed.), Kultura baroka v Cˇechaćh a na Moraveˇ (Pr., 1992). Cf. Jirˇ´ı Mikulec, Baroknı´ na´bozˇenska´ bratrstva v Cˇechaćh (Pr., 2000).


89

St Wenceslas became more closely attached to the rest of the Monarchy, especially to its thriving metropolis of Vienna, so selected Bohemians fitted themselves for a wider role. The first example, grand but idiosyncratic, is Albrecht von Waldstein, whose meteoric rise from an impoverished branch of senior Czech nobility to become generalissimo of the imperialist armies and duke of Friedland, Sagan, and Mecklenburg needs no introduction. Wallenstein’s fall yielded a cautionary moral, and the fact that over-mighty Bohemian commanders could be as suspect as Bohemian Protestants was not lost on seventeenth-century Habsburg rulers. Yet it did not hinder the advance of a series of confidants from the same quarter, mostly from old-established families. They were joined by the amphibious Austro-Moravian Liechtensteins and Dietrichsteins, whose ascendancy—notwithstanding the foibles of Karl Liechtenstein—also dates back to the same period.22 The next clan to be drawn into the inner circle were the Lobkowitzes. Zdeneˇk Vojteˇch Lobkowitz, an essential prop to Ferdinand II’s ambitions for Bohemia both before 1618 and after 1620, remained merely a national figure, and a slightly disgruntled one by the end. However, his son, Wenzel Eusebius, became President of the War Council, and then chief minister to Leopold I in the years around 1670. Lobkowitz, who as duke of Sagan even earned himself one of Wallenstein’s titles, likewise fell into disgrace before his death. Yet his successors retained a foothold in the Viennese corridors of power, as did several Waldsteins who served in the entourage of Leopold as foreign diplomats. One of that emperor’s most intimate friends was Humprecht Jan Czernin. Leopold’s correspondence with him reveals how quickly Habsburg memories of Bohemian rebelliousness (which had cost one Czernin his head) could be replaced by a bond of profound trust, while still allowing occasional scope for persiflage.23 The integration of Bohemians in Vienna was much helped by the presence there of the Chancellery, which both directed administration and worked to harmonize legal procedures (contrast the continued separateness of Hungarian courts, or of Scottish ones within Great Britain). In the decades after 1683 four members of the Kinsky family occupied the post of Bohemian Chancellor. The first of them, Franz Ulrich, also served as an outstanding diplomat at the Nijmegen peace negotiations, and then in Germany, before acting effectively as foreign minister during the 1690s. A Moravian aristocrat, Dominik Andreas Kaunitz, succeeded him in this role and became the first Czech to head the 22 As a general phenomenon, the Bohemian presence in Austria stands in need of the attention of historians. For the ‘Bohemian’ view of Wallenstein, see Josef Janaćˇek, Valdsˇtejnova smrt (Pr., 1970). For the Liechtensteins, see V. Press and D. Willoweit (ed.), Liechtenstein—fu¨rstliches Haus und staatliche Ordnung (Vaduz/Mun., 1987). Much on the world of these aristocrats in Thomas Winkelbauer, Fu¨rst und Fu¨rstendiener: Gundaker von Liechtenstein, ein o¨sterreichischer Aristokrat des konfessionellen Zeitalters (V., 1999), and in Mat’a, Sveˇt ˇceske´ aristokracie. 23 Z. Kalista (ed.), Korespondence cı ´sarˇe Leopolda I. s Humprechtem Janem Cˇernıńem z Chudenic, i (only) (Prague, 1936). Barker, Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy, discusses Lobkowitz. On Leopold and Bohemia, cf. Jirˇ´ı Mikulec, Leopold I: Zˇivot a vla´da baroknı´ho Habsburka (Pr., 1997), esp. 98–125.

90


Imperial Court Chancellery (Reichshofkanzlei). A clutch of other Bohemian ambassadors, like Karl Ferdinand Waldstein and his son Karl Ernst, Georg Adam Martinitz, and Johann Wenzel Gallas, later viceroy of Naples, vied for prominence with Bohemian soldiers, of whom perhaps the most famous was Kaspar Kaplı´ˇr, commander of Vienna during the siege of 1683. Such men, sharing a community of interest, came to form something like a ‘party’, and lent a decisive new impulse to the existing triangular relationship between the Habsburgs, Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Empire. Bohemia still belonged formally within the Reich. From 1708 she even regained her voice at the imperial diet where her envoy actually represented the Austrian lands too.24 Yet her spokesmen at court, from Lobkowitz on (perhaps the same had been true earlier in the century with Wallenstein), tended to be at odds with the German priorities of much Habsburg policy. They tended to look to alliance with France instead—this was the initiative which unseated Lobkowitz in 1674. The other prong of their campaign pointed south-east. As the Turkish threat receded, the resentment of Bohemians hardened towards the privileged position of Hungary within the monarchy. They stood at the forefront of attempts to administer to the Magyars some of their own 1620s medicine. Lobkowitz played an important advisory part in the assault on Hungary’s liberties after 1670, just as Kinsky did in the acquisition of Transylvania as a separate province during the 1690s. After 1700 the great expansion of Austria might have seemed propitious for the further advancement of Bohemian interests within it. Yet the reverse proved to be the case. Emperor Charles VI’s favours were bestowed elsewhere; career opportunities at his court were afforded rather to Spaniards, Italians, and Germans. Hungary fought the Habsburgs to a stalemate by 1711 and the comparative autonomy of her estates’ administration in Pressburg clearly trumped that of the Landesausschuss in Prague. At home, the maintenance of empire demanded ever greater financial sacrifices. Bohemia found herself still bearing 50 per cent of the tax burden. This proportion rose still higher by the 1730s although, precisely because of the military triumphs under Prince Eugene, there appeared to be no direct threat to her. Moreover, extraordinary war taxation, levied on all, undermined the traditional exemption of nobility and clergy in respect of their own demesnes. Meanwhile new excise taxes could bypass supervision by the estates altogether. At the same time direct government interference in other spheres grew, notably through its first halting steps to aid a peasantry which oppression rendered increasingly rebellious. Such frustrations and sense of neglect coincided with the exuberant patriotic culture of the Bohemian High Baroque, symbolized by ostentatious veneration of two national saints, ancient and modern: Wenceslas and John Nepomuk. In the embarrassing absence of a male heir, the Habsburgs’ future was ostensibly secured for Charles’s 24 J. Vesely ´ , ‘K ota´zce lennı´ho vztahu k ˇr´ımske´ ˇr´ıˇsi v cˇeskyćh deˇjinaćh’, Sbornı´k Archivnıćh Pracı´, 29 (1979), 56–110.


91

daughter, Maria Theresa, by the Pragmatic Sanction, which the Bohemian lands acknowledged in 1720. Yet contemporaries vaguely realized that other options might be available.25

The nine years from 1740 to 1749 form a pale, but in some ways uncanny, reflection of those from 1618 to 1627. Again there was disloyalty and retribution, mainly in the guise of a tough reform agenda. Again there was a ‘winter king’, but this time his arrival preceded the defection from Habsburg rule. Again an important religious dimension came into play, now not so much domestically (though Maria Theresa wanted Prague’s Jews, the only non-Catholics still tolerated, to be scapegoats26), as in the international confrontation with Prussia, which confirmed the need for a new brand of Catholicism. Again Moravia, and perforce Silesia, acted quite independently of Bohemia. Again the crown suffered the amputation of one of its limbs. And again the ensuing wars ravaged the country intermittently for over two decades. On the death of Charles VI, Frederick II immediately asserted by force of arms Prussia’s very sketchy genealogical claims to Silesia. With his encouragement, the Bavarian Elector, Charles Albert, presented shortly afterwards a claim to the rest of the Bohemian lands. Hardly more convincing than Frederick II’s, it was founded on an interpretation of marriage treaties entered into two centuries earlier by Ferdinand I.27 The Bavarian challenge, while it may remind us of 1526, involved a curious reversal of sides since 1620. Few, if any, of Maria Theresa’s subjects had actively plotted with the enemy. Nevertheless many members of the estates kept their powder dry: the diet session which approved the Pragmatic Sanction had been attended by only 25 lords and 18 knights. When Charles Albert reached Prague in late 1741, a clear majority of office-holders, clergy, and towns, and a narrow majority of the whole nobility, offered homage to him as King Charles III of Bohemia. Their pressure on him to reside in the country and to guarantee all privileges and traditions of the Bohemian nation indicates the (perhaps contradictory) nature of dissatisfaction with the old regime. Meanwhile in Silesia, where Protestants still constituted a majority in many areas, willingness to see the back of the Habsburgs was yet more manifest.28 25 There has been little discussion of this disenchantment (or of Charles VI’s rule as a whole). Even Hassenpflug-Elzholz, Bo¨hmen und die bo¨hmischen Sta¨nde, considers its consequences rather than its causes. For cultural frictions see Pavel Preiss, Boje s dvouhlavou sanı´: F. A. Sˇpork a baroknı´ kultura v Cˇechaćh (2nd edn., Prague, 2003). Brilliant reconstruction of the Nepomuk cult by Vı´t Vlnas, Jan Nepomucky´, ˇceska´ legenda (Pr., 1993). 26 For this episode, see, most recently, Stefan Plaggenborg in Bohemia, 39 (1998), 1–16. 27 Ludwig Hu ¨ sterreich in der ¨ ttl, ‘Die bayerischen Erbanspru¨che auf Bo¨hmen, Ungarn und O fru¨hen Neuzeit’, in Ferdinand Seibt (ed.), Die bo¨hmischen La¨nder zwischen Ost und West (Mun., 1983), 70–88. For the big picture, see Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (Stroud, 1994). 28 Hassenpflug-Elzholz, Bo ¨hmen und die bo¨hmischen Sta¨nde (especially 38 ff., 374 ff., for the 1720 diet). On Silesia, cf. in general P. Baumgart (ed.), Kontinuita¨t und Wandel: Schlesien zwischen ¨ sterreich und Preußen (Sigmaringen, 1990). O

92


The fortunes of war soon changed. In a little over a year, Maria Theresa’s armies recaptured all Bohemia and Moravia, but only the southern tip of Silesia. Exactions by the Bavarians’ French allies alienated domestic opinion and the next invasion in 1744–5 enjoyed no local support. When hostilities ended for a time in 1748, Maria Theresa exacted her revenge. Although any principle of ‘Austrian clemency’ is as much a figment of historians’ imagination as the blacker legends of Habsburg cruelty, the reckoning proved in this case to be remarkably mild and strictly practical. In the long run, the loss of Silesia was to have incalculable consequences both for the Monarchy and for the rest of the Bohemian lands, where, among other things, it confirmed Czech speakers as a clear majority of the population. In the short run, however, the need was for a brisk reform programme to emulate and, if possible, surpass the Prussian state. Thus was inaugurated the second and more intense stage of Bohemia’s incorporation into the Habsburg Monarchy. From 1749 the Empress rapidly combined the Bohemian Chancellery with the existing Austrian one, and established a single supreme court in Vienna. She reorganized local government and formalized the liability of nobles and church to pay direct taxes. Participation by the estates in administration was correspondingly reduced. Under Joseph II it ceased altogether for a time. Yet the personnel at the top remained much the same as before. Individual aristocrats from old-established families, anxious to make amends, manned senior positions in Bohemia as if nothing had happened. One example is provided by the career of Philipp Kolowrat, the acting head of the regime in Prague under the Bavarians. He then served as Grand Burgrave from 1748 until his death in 1771. Moravian lords, who had preserved a scrupulous loyalty during the early 1740s, cooperated still more readily.29 After the interruption of the Seven Years War, the modernization of the Habsburg lands accelerated. To institutional changes were added economic and cultural ones. Under the paternal stimulus of government, manufactures expanded rapidly and new agrarian techniques took root. Both developments were concentrated in Bohemia. Mass textile production dates from this period, especially in the districts north-west and north-east of Prague and at Brno/Bru¨nn in Moravia, where a total of nearly 200,000 workers was employed by 1780. There, too, experiments in land tenure, crops, and cropping methods found most support.30 At the same time, a transformation began in relations between church and state, as the regime sought to utilize ecclesiastical resources more efficiently, inculcate rational, unprejudiced attitudes and simpler forms of observance among the clergy, and take control of the educational system. Again Bohemia was the 29 Frantis ˇek Roubı´k, ‘K vy´voji zemske´ spra´vy v Cˇechaćh v letech 1749–90’, Sbornı´k Archivnıćh Pracı´, 19 (1969), 41–188; Dickson, Finance and Government, i. 257 ff. passim. 30 Klı ´ma, Manufakturnı´ obdobı´; Herman Freudenberger, The Waldstein Woolen Mill: Noble Entrepreneurship in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia (Camb., Mass., 1963); id., The Industrialization of a Central European City: Brno and the Fine Woollen Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Edington, Wilts., 1977); William E. Wright, Serf, Seigneur and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in EighteenthCentury Bohemia (Minneapolis, 1966).


93

crucible for such endeavours, as in the work of the priest-pedagogue, Ferdinand Kindermann. They culminated in the patents issued by Joseph II after his accession in 1780 which abolished serfdom and granted religious toleration. Bohemia and Moravia thus became the twin heartlands—distinct, but developing in parallel—of the movement known to historians, from its radical Habsburg protagonist, as ‘Josephinism’. They provided the Emperor (as we shall see) with his leading policy-makers. They also gave him some of his closest personal friends, such as Count Friedrich Nostitz or Prince Johann Karl Dietrichstein. They evolved a symbiosis of loyalty with enlightened patriotism which proved fruitful for generating moderately progressive ideas, identified with the country. Aristocrats old and new—Franz Anton Nostitz, brother of Friedrich, a long-serving Grand Burgrave and lavish patron, is a striking example—presided over a flowering of talented commoners, particularly around the Society (later Academy) of Sciences, founded during the 1770s, and the freemasonic lodges: Stepling, Dobner, Pelcl, Seibt, Born, Dobrovsky´. Even society at large was stirred by such gestures as Joseph’s handling the plough himself on a Moravian peasant plot, and the widespread admiration for the Emperor-Liberator acquired the status of a national cult.31 Not that tensions, sometimes grave ones, were absent. One of the catalysts for change in the 1770s was old-fashioned peasant revolt and confessional strife. The excesses of reform in the 1780s, together with the harshness of Joseph’s manner, alienated not a few supporters as well as conservatives. Then the coming of the French Revolution was a sobering experience for the government and it stimulated certain kinds of opposition. Yet discontent proved fairly easy to contain after the Emperor’s death in 1790. The diet reasserted some authority, but only within long-accepted and modest parameters. There were hardly any ‘Jacobins’ in Bohemia, even if the radical Viennese clubs numbered a few Bohemian members in their ranks. The authorities were able to forestall any serious reaction with timely limited concessions to the resurgent estates. In the period of wars against Napoleon, Bohemia repeated her conduct during the anti-French coalition exactly a century previously and gave no real hint of dissent or independence of action.32 31 Winter, Josefinismus, is a Bohemian-centred interpretation. See also the social-cultural surveys by Schamschula, Anfa¨nge; A. S. Myl’nikov, Epokha prosveshcheniya v Cheshskich zemlyach (Moscow, 1977); Haubelt, Cˇeske´ osvıćenstvı´. Moravia receives her due in Kroupa’s outstanding Alchymie ˇsteˇstı´. For Joseph’s personal ties to Bohemia, see Beales, Joseph II, esp. chs. 10–11. For the plough-episode: Heinz Haushofer in Wege und Forschungen der Agrargeschichte: Festschrift G. Franz, ed. Haushofer ¨ sterreich zur Zeit Kaiser and W. A. Boelcke (Frankfurt a.M., 1967), 171–80; Metodeˇj Zemek in O Josephs II., ed. Gutkas et al., 291 f. Cf., on the ‘Book of Joseph’, below, p. 143. 32 Good survey by Pavel Be ˇlina, ‘Politicke´ uda´losti let 1789–97 v na´zorech meˇˇst’anske´ inteligence a lidovyćh pisma´ku˚ v cˇeskyćh zemıćh’, CˇsCˇH, 35 (1987), 844–72; cf. Anna M. Drabek ¨ sterreich zur Zeit der Napoleonischen Kriege (V., 1989), 71–84; Pavel Beˇlina in CˇCˇH, in Rußland und O 89 (1991), 356–73. Michael Vanˇaćˇek, Francouzove´ a Morava v dobeˇ Francouzske´ revoluce a koalicˇnıćh va´lek (Brno, 1965), Kveˇta Mejdrˇicka´, Cˇechy a Francouzska´ revoluce (Pr., 1959), and Josef V. Polisˇensky´, Napoleon a srdce Evropy (Pr., 1971), make what they can of evidence of discontent.

94


The decades after 1815 represent for our purposes the last phase of the Austrian ancien re´gime, the last stage in the subordination of Bohemia to overall Habsburg purposes. Maria Theresa’s institutional structure survived intact, with the United Chancellery in Vienna transmitting the imperial will to provincial authorities (Gubernia) on Prague’s Hradschin and in Bru¨nn, presided over by officials who still bore the time-honoured titles of Grand Burgrave in Bohemia, and Landeshauptmann in Moravia and rump Silesia. Beneath the surface, it is true, things were altering. Considerable material advance characterized these years, with the introduction of steam-power in factories and communications and the rise of new agrarian staples like sugar-beet. So too did intellectual advance, as the Slav vanguard of a Germanized regional culture began to reorientate itself and its new national institutions into openly Czech channels. For the present, however, the mutation remained discreet, genteel, and at least semi-official, supervised by members of the great historic families, above all by another Kolowrat, Franz Anton, Grand Burgrave between 1809 and 1825, by his successor until 1843, Karel Chotek, and in Moravia by Anton Friedrich Mittrowsky.33 Yet if Bohemia had come to form a mere province of Austria, Austria was now governed to a remarkable degree by that same oligarchy from Bohemia. The process of takeover had palpably quickened since the 1740s, drawing upon and feeding the notable ideological understanding reached between the dynasty and its chief supporters there. One of them, Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, grandson of Dominik Andreas, occupied for forty years a pre-eminent position in both the foreign and domestic affairs of the monarchy. On the international stage, Kaunitz clearly inherited the mantle of the ‘Bohemian party’. His most celebrated coup was the revival, in the early 1750s, of a French alliance at the expense of reconciliation in the Holy Roman Empire. In other ways too, such as the proposed swap of the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, he proved himself ready to ride roughshod over imperial traditions. From 1760 he also operated increasingly as a senior bureaucrat, with a leading voice in the new State Council (Staatsrat). As councillor, this exquisite salon politician pursued papal pretensions and the ecclesiastical establishment with all the tenacity of a born-again Hussite, while renewing the attack on Hungarian privileges, at first covertly, but later in harness with the aggressive Joseph.34 Kaunitz’s chief rival during his rise to power was a Silesian aristocrat, Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz, the instigator of the whole project of administrative reform which had as its cornerstone the union of the Bohemian and Austrian Chancelleries. At the head of that combined institution during its four initial 33 Background in Jitka Lneˇnic ˇkova´, Cˇeske´ zemeˇ v dobeˇ prˇedbrˇeznove´, 1792–1848 (Pr., 1999); Ralph Melville, Adel und Revolution in Bo¨hmen: Strukturwandel von Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in ¨ sterreich um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1998). O 34 For Kaunitz see Klingenstein, Aufstieg des Hauses Kaunitz; Szabo, Kaunitz; Klingenstein and Szabo (ed.), Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg.


95

and most vigorous decades stood a succession of Haugwitz’s fellow countrymen: Joseph Chotek in the 1750s, then his brother Rudolf, then Heinrich Cajetan Blu¨megen between 1771 and 1782 and Leopold Kolowrat (son of Philipp) between 1782 and 1796. Meanwhile Kaunitz shared control of the State Council with a further Bohemian count, Karl Hatzfeld, who served as its chairman from 1771 to 1793. Hatzfeld had previously been President of the Hofkammer, the Austrian treasury, a job in which he was followed for no less than twenty-five years by the indefatigable Kolowrat (who later managed to combine it with being Chancellor). Wherever we look in the Austrian government of this period we find Bohemians.35 Even the highest dignity of the Reich in Vienna, the post of Imperial Vice-Chancellor, had passed to them, in the person of Count, later Prince, Rudolf Colloredo, who served over half a century in the office before being succeeded by his son Franz. Admittedly the Imperial Chancellery fell into deepening shadow, upstaged by Kaunitz; and some Dietrichsteins, Liechtensteins, Wrbnas, and the like occupied largely ceremonial positions at court. But most of these Habsburg servants were very far from holding sinecures. In the area of church reform, for example, leading Josephinists threw themselves into a bruising conflict with the clerical hierarchy. Franz von Heinke, son of a customs official in Prague, was a leading Erastian and scourge of the traditionalists; whilst Franz Karl Kresl von Qualtenberg moved from the Bohemian administration to be the Emperor’s right-hand man in ecclesiastical and educational affairs. Even Stephan Rautenstrauch, abbot of Brˇevnov, just outside Prague, the country’s most important Benedictine monastery, lent his full support. In the army too, some of the most enterprising officers came from the Bohemian lands, notably Franz Josef Kinsky, co-founder of the Society of Sciences in Prague and an educationalist who—as we saw earlier—instituted the teaching of Czech in the Military Academy established by him at Wiener Neustadt.36 After 1792, as reform from above subsided into reaction under Emperor Francis, the bureaucracy continued to expand, and a broader army of Bohemians manned posts throughout Austria, often sustaining aspects of enlightened practice at the same time. Two divergent instances are both typical (but also atypical in that, much later, those involved wrote down their experiences). Karl Friedrich Ku¨beck, son of an artisan at Iglau, who gained a good progressive education in Vienna, enjoyed rapid advancement in central government; whilst the ultramontane Catholic, Ignaz Beidtel, again from an impoverished Moravian background, served mainly in the province while gaining his encyclopaedic, 35 Again (cf. above, n. 22) there is nothing systematic. There is a mass of miscellaneous information in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon. Dickson, Finance and Government, i, chs. 12–13 and associated tables, is very useful for the reign of Maria Theresa. 36 Maass (ed.), Der Josephinismus, iii (for Heinke); Menzel, Rautenstrauch. On Kinsky: above, pp. 43, 55, 60f. On Bohemian officials in general, cf. Martina Ondo-Grecˇenkova´ in Vlast a rodny´ kraj v dı´le historika: Sbornı´k pracı´ zˇa´ku˚ a prˇa´tel veˇnovany´ profesoru Josefu Petrańˇovi, ed. J. Pańek (Pr., 2004), 473–94.

96


jaundiced, and highly critical insights into the whole system.37 Such men represent the tip of an iceberg. In other walks of life too, Bohemians from simple circumstances began to make a massive contribution to the Austrian scene. One of the few fields to have received much study is music. From Gluck’s generation onwards, composers and performers flooded to Vienna—Vanhal and Vranitzky, Gyrowetz, Vorˇ´ıˇsek, and others (even Ku¨beck began work as a music teacher and prote´ge´ of Beethoven). The last official court composers to the Habsburg dynasty were the Praguer, Leopold Kozˇeluh, and the Moravian, Franz Krommer-Krama´ˇr. Both are good evidence for the Bohemian connection, as well as for the Emperor Francis’s inability to recognize genius.38 Other talented immigrants were the growing numbers of Jews, following in the footsteps of Josef von Sonnenfels, ideologue of the Austrian Enlightenment, but son of the rabbi at Nikolsburg (Mikulov). Even more striking, however, is the continuing hold by Bohemians over the state apparatus of Austria. The ageing Leopold Kolowrat watched over the retreat from Josephinism—when he retired in 1806, by then as chairman of the Staatsrat, he had served for sixty-three years! His compatriots included Ignaz Chorinsky, Prokop Lazˇansky, yet another Chotek (Johann Rudolf), and the Emperor’s close associate, Rudolf Wrbna. Then came Metternich, who, of course, grew up in the Rhineland, far from the Habsburg realms. Yet Metternich acquired, besides a large estate in Bohemia to add to the family’s ancestral possessions there, the residue of the foreign-political programme of his grandfather-in-law, Kaunitz: pursuit of good relations with France, a remarkably unfeeling attitude towards his native Germany, and a tough line against Hungarian autonomy, at least until the 1840s.39 Shifts in his policy then had much to do—apart from the influence of his pupil Ku¨beck—with attempts to outmanoeuvre Metternich’s main rival, who was none other than Franz Anton Kolowrat, transferred to Vienna since 1826 as Minister of State. And plenty more historic Slav names resounded through the faction-ridden corridors of government in Vorma¨rz Vienna, like those of Josef Sedlnitzky, the infamous chief of police, or of Mittrowsky, who moved at the same time as Kolowrat in order to take over the United Chancellery. 37 M. von Ku ¨ beck (ed.), Tagebu¨cher des Carl Friedrich Freiherrn Ku¨beck von Ku¨bau (3 vols., V., 1909–10); Ignaz Beidtel, Geschichte der o¨sterreichischen Staatsverwaltung, 1740–1848 (2 vols., Innsbruck, 1896–8). The best general picture remains that in C. A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918 (L., 1968), 147–305. 38 Autobiography of Gyrowetz: Vlastnı ´ zˇivotopis Vojteˇcha Jı´rovce, ed. F. Bartosˇ (Pr., 1940); Milan Postolka, Leopold Kozˇeluh: zˇivot a dı´lo (Pr., 1964); Paul R. Bryan, Johann Wanhal, Viennese Symphonist: His Life and his Musical Environment (Stuyvesant, NY, 1997). 39 See, in general, Heinrich von Srbik, Metternich: Der Staatsmann und der Mensch (3 vols., Mun., 1925–54); his Bohemian connections have never been properly analysed, but cf. Kanzle´ˇr Metternich a jeho doba, ed. J. Hoffmannova´ (Pr., 1995), a CD-ROM edn. of documents from the Acta Clementina.


97

In 1848–9 the immobile edifice of late Habsburg absolutism collapsed. What followed in Bohemia was a genuine revolution in that, for the first time since 1526, the outcome did not strengthen, but began to weaken, her bonds with Austria. The forces for cohesion had always been oligarchic. Democracy would now gradually turn the tide and undermine them. It would also dramatically polarize domestic politics, since in an age of rising nationalism those forces, despite the bridging efforts of Czechophile aristocrats, had become ever more associated with German interests, and the Habsburgs could never quite undo the damage in the future. This logical conclusion to the present investigation also refers us back to our starting point of 1526. The situation by 1848 reversed that earlier one. The once independent and self-contained kingdom had been provincialized in its own public life, whereas some of its citizens now exercised decisive sway over the destiny of a great empire. At the same time a powerful inverted symmetry can be discerned, since, as Vienna had drawn away local talent, the vacuum was coming to be filled once again by a majority Czech language and culture. Thus 1526 and 1848 stand at the end and the beginning of two periods of Bohemia’s separate development based on cultural transformation: her declining spiritual distinctiveness in the age of Reformation being matched by her rising intellectual distinctiveness in the age of Romanticism. Moreover, there existed a direct link between the two, for secular Czech culture after 1848 drew heavily on the Hussite legacy from before 1526, while the political movement for Bohemia’s state rights in the nineteenth century aimed specifically to overturn the whole constitutional evolution since 1526 (or at least since 1620).40 Some of the former difficulties remained, particularly the reservations of Moravia which, still having more to lose from separatism and resenting dominance by Prague, continued to seek her own solutions as late as 1905. Yet in the end modern nationalism would bind together societies and provinces more effectively than Utraquist religion, or even the Catholic church of the Habsburgs, had ever succeeded in doing. For a time, nevertheless, much of the old fabric could be stitched together again, and by protagonists in the traditional mould. The saviours of Austria in 1848–9 were two Bohemian generals and a Bohemian statesman: Field-Marshal Prince Alfred Windischgra¨tz, brought up there on estates acquired by his father, as free-thinking a friend of Joseph II as his son was diehard; Field-Marshal Count Josef Wenzel Radetzky, offspring—as becomes more evident if we respell his surname ‘Radecky´’—of an ancient, if previously undistinguished, Moravian line; and Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, whose family were the richest landowners of all. But the last word would belong to a fourth compatriot, to Frantisˇek Palacky´, Czech political leader and foremost historian of his country. Early in 1848, adapting the time-honoured ‘Bohemian’ foreign policy of opposition to 40 Classic late nineteenth-century statements of these theses are Toma ´ˇs G. Masaryk, Cˇeska´ ota´zka, snahy a tuzˇby na´rodnı´ho obrozenı´ (Pr., 1895), and Josef Kalousek, Cˇeske´ sta´tnı´ pra´vo (Pr., 1871).

98


Germany and Hungary—and to Russia, doing duty now for the Turks of old— Palacky´ could still coin a celebrated bon mot about the need to invent the Habsburg Monarchy as a protector if it had not already existed. By the 1860s he delivered himself, in despair, of an equally celebrated prophecy: ‘We were before Austria; we shall be after her too.’41 Significantly enough, Palacky´’s own pioneering historical narrative stopped short at the very year 1526. 41 ‘Byli sme pr ˇed Rakouskem, budeme i po neˇm!’, printed in his Radhost: sbı´rka spisu˚ drobnyćh (3 vols., Prague, 1871–3), iii. 229. For the circumstances of Palacky´’s 1848 remarks, printed ibid. 10–17, see Stanley Z. Pech, The Czech Revolution of 1848 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), 80 ff.; Jirˇ´ı Korˇalka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich und in Europa, 1815–1914 (V./Munich, 1991), 175 ff. The definitive life is now id., Frantisˇek Palacky´, 1798–1876: Zˇivotopis (Pr., 1999). Still useful: Joseph F. Zacek [Zˇaćˇek], Palacky: The Historian as Scholar and Nationalist (The Hague, 1970).

PART II T HE R I SE O F N AT I O NS


6 Nationality in East-Central Europe: Perception and Definition before 1848 Little of the burgeoning literature on the origins of modern nationalism in the decades around 1800—especially the controversy as to how far national allegiances existed earlier and how far they were generated by the specific conditions of that time—has seriously addressed the phenomenon in the area of Europe where its destructive potential first became apparent. This essay introduces the political, socioeconomic, and intellectual background to the rise of national identity in EastCentral Europe. In particular it stresses the role of the westernized intellectuals, whether of noble or of commoner extraction, who both acted as conduits and themselves reformulated cosmopolitan cultural influences as national agendas. It is conceived deliberately as a brief sketch, to be understood in the context of other pieces in this collection which elaborate on some of the relevant individuals and themes.

East-Central Europe has a firm place in the British historiography of nationalism. Not only did the creation in the region after the First World War, under the aegis of the western allies, of nation-states (or what were deemed to be such), and the resulting problems of international instability, generate incisive studies of contemporary national feeling and its genesis in which academic commentators like R. W. Seton-Watson and C. A. Macartney were prominent.1 A number of pioneers of the vibrant modern debate on the roots of nationalism in the Anglo-American world either came from the area, as did a string of writers from Hans Kohn to Ernst Gellner (both Praguers), or possessed close associations with it (like the younger Seton-Watson).2 The long-standing ethnic frictions of Unpublished; first drafted 1982 for a seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. 1 R. J. W. Evans, Great Britain and East-Central Europe, 1908–48: A Study in Perceptions (L., 2002); id., in Das Ungarnbild der deutschen Historiographie, ed. M. Fata (Stuttgart, 2004), 110–25 (Macartney). 2 Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York, 1944); cf. his memoirs Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (New York, 1964). Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (L., 1983), etc.; cf. J. A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Camb., 1998). Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (L., 1977). Cf. Robert A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918 (2 vols., New York, 1950).

102

The Rise of Nations

East-Central Europe have thus played a major part in shaping this fashionable discipline. Yet their origins in the decades around 1800 remain unfamiliar to most western observers. Only the schematic work of another Praguer, Miroslav Hroch, designed through a German edition for comparative analysis in Marxist circles in the 1960s and later adapted for an English-language audience, yielded insights and information which have become at all widely known.3 What follows is a bare sketch of the dynamics of evolution of this, the most important underlying theme in the whole of the rest of the present volume. The non-German, non-Russian, non-Ottoman sweep of territory from the Baltic to the lower Danube, which by the nineteenth century contained no single independent state, was a region—as I shall try to contend—long close to the western experience, with few genuinely exotic features; yet far enough away to construct its own separate identity (or series of identities) by consciously measuring itself against the West. In perceiving itself it defined itself. And the dynamic national sentiments which it came to incubate as a consequence proved to be the area’s most far-reaching contribution to the making of the modern world. In 1848–9 East-Central Europe witnessed an explosion of national bitterness, rival communities under arms, struggling ferociously for national ends with an intensity unmatched elsewhere, perhaps until the twentieth century. Under the strain of that contest, reform programmes fractured and revolution collapsed. Why should countries which appeared—or at least increasingly perceived themselves as—receptive and retarded in everything else, suddenly prove so forward in the venom with which they asserted the ethnic idea? Three broad explanations have been advanced for this precocious animosity, which had altered the face of the area in little more than half a century. The first, political, points to the pressures of ‘Josephinism’, the centralizing absolutist designs of the Habsburg dynasty, which reached a climax during the 1780s. The pursuit of uniform sovereignty, accompanied by the introduction of German where previously Latin had held sway for official purposes, engendered a series of patriotic reactions. Blind conservatism mingled with more enlightened brands of localism. Meanwhile a similar process of escalated state influence began in the last years of independent Poland, as foreign powers first threatened the Republic and then encompassed its partition to frustrate domestic renewal.4 3 Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes (Camb., 1985); from Die Vorka¨mpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Vo¨lkern Europas: Eine vergleichende Analyse zur gesellschaftlichen Schichtung der patriotischen Gruppe (Pr., 1968); first thoughts, ‘on the problem of the formation of the bourgeois nation in Europe’, in CˇsCˇH, 9 (1961), 374 ff. Hroch’s important later work, specifically on Bohemia, is cited elsewhere in this volume, esp. Na prahu na´rodnı´ existence. 4 General surveys listed above, Pref., n. 7. Cf. ch. 8 below. A valuable new case-study of the issue of patriotism in 1780s–90s Hungary is O. V. Khavanova, Natsiia, otechestro, patriotizm v vengerskoi politicheskoi kul’ture: dvizhenie 1790 goda (Moscow, 2000).

Nationality in East-Central Europe

103

The second account emphasizes economic factors, in a more-or-less Marxist line of investigation. The ideal of nationhood was inseparable from the material need for a national market, thus from a commercial and industrial advance which owed something to the mercantilist policies of governments, but was also rooted in the contemporary bourgeois transformation of the continent. From the later eighteenth century industrial revolution began to affect the region, creating a new mobility, considerable urbanization, and elements of social restructuring.5 The third explanation concentrates on the intellectual climate from Enlightenment to Romanticism. It examines the impact, during those same years, of the French Revolution, with its notions of fraternity and citizenship; and then the German response, especially the cult of the individual Volk and the diversity of Vo¨lker as inspired by Herder, and the experience of Napoleonic conquest and liberation. The potent new ideologies had immediate repercussions in the East through Freemasons, Jacobins, readers and translators of poets and philosophers, and political pamphleteers.6 All these approaches contain important insights; all—but particularly the last—address questions of self-fashioning, or construction, of identity. Evidently none is sufficient on its own to account for the phenomenon of accelerated national consciousness. Nor, I think, would they suffice, as they stand, even in the kind of balanced combination which no historian has yet adequately provided. I shall direct attention towards one further element, which in some measure unites the foregoing ones: towards the process, in good part a social one, of receptivity. The intellectuals who transmitted ideas across the continent thereby set up a situation of paradox, for it was precisely the international contacts which yielded national conclusions. Moreover, they mediated not only across space, but through time. It is a striking feature of the national ideals advanced by East-Central Europeans in the nineteenth century that they were often strongly retrospective, even conservative, at the expense—especially in their 5 An important example: Endre Arato ´ , A nemzetise´gi ke´rde´s to¨rteńete Magyarorsza´gon, 1790–1848 (2 vols., Bp., 1960), esp. i. 13 ff., 68 ff. Cf. the relevant sections of Hroch, Vorka¨mpfer, and Jo´zef Chlebowczyk, On Small and Young Nations in Europe: Nation-Forming Processes in Ethnic Borderlands in East-Central Europe (Wrocław, 1980), abbreviated from his Procesy narodotwo´rcze we wschodniej Europie ´srodkowej w dobie kapitalizmu: od schylku XVIII do poczatko´w XX w. (Warsaw, 1975). Cf. also Ivań T. Berend and Gyo¨rgy Rańki, The European Peripheryˇ and Industrialization, 1780–1914 (Camb., 1982). An ideological lead, and also valuable work, came from the Institut Slavyanovedeniya in Moscow: e.g. T. Islamov and V. I. Freidzon (ed.), Osvoboditelnye dvizheniia narodov Avstriiskoi imperii: vozniknovenie i razvitie, konets XVIII v.–1849 g. (Moscow, 1980); V. S. Bondarchuk and Freidzon (ed.), Osvoboditelnye dvizheniia narodov Avstriiskoi imperii: period utverzhdeniia kapitalizma . . . (Moscow, 1981); I. S. Miller and Freidzon (ed.), Formirovanie natsii v TSentralnoi i YUgo-vostochnoi Evrope: istoricheskii i istoriko-kulturnyi aspekty (Moscow, 1981). 6 Jerzy Szacki, Ojczyzna, naro ´d, rewolucja: problematyka narodowa w polskiej mysli szlacheckorewolucyjnej (Warsaw, 1962). Lesńodorski, Les Jacobins polonais; H. Reinalter (ed.), Jakobiner in Mitteleuropa (Innsbruck, 1977); Emil Niederhauser, A nemzeti megu´jula´si mozgalmak KeletEuro´pa´ban (Bp., 1977); id., The Rise of Nationality in Eastern Europe (Bp., 1982); J. Z. Lichan´ski (ed.), Mie¸ dzy os´wieceniem i romantyzmem: kultura polska okolo 1800 roku (Warsaw, 1997). Recent introduction in Ivań T. Berend, History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 2003).

104

The Rise of Nations

earlier phase—of a liberal-democratic platform which might well appear more appropriate to emerging and disadvantaged, stateless groups. That too was a formulation by intellectual leaders, ever more ready to persuade themselves and others of the need to emulate states and societies further west. ‘Backwardness’ was at least as much a home-grown notion as one imputed from without.7 It was not, however, necessarily conceived in terms of simply catching up some purported lag in development. The eminent vehicle for a constructive local response was the nation, and in order to understand the latter’s new-found status we must briefly consider the genesis of the acquisition of communal self-knowledge. Conditions for it had been laid down long before its militant manifestos which commenced around the 1780s.

Of course, some awareness of nationality had undoubtedly existed in the Middle Ages, but it was restricted to particular circumstances and functions. Mostly it gave rise to short-lived grievances and involved the ruling or educated classes only marginally. From about 1500 the Renaissance created more scope for manifestations of it. On the one hand, vernacular languages spread in administrative and legal use (notably in Bohemia and Poland); on the other, humanist scholars studied the history and geography of their fatherland beside more neutral learned pursuits. Renaissance concerns coincided closely with the confessional division of the region, and the national impact of the Reformation proved far-reaching in the long run. Protestant initiatives in translating the Bible and other religious texts, and in providing at least the rudiments of popular education, confirmed the role of major languages in the region—Hussitism is a genuine and famous precursor of this movement—while extending by the end of the sixteenth century even to the rude and remote confines of Slovenes or Lithuanians. Meanwhile the Reformation split into several rival camps, and Counter-Reformation, though much delayed, took over. The latter pursued a deliberate policy of combating the Protestants’ fissiparous localism, but in fact needed to employ some of the same weapons. And we have the negative evidence of Orthodox Churches, resisting overtures and pressures from Protestant and Catholic alike, being confirmed in their distinctiveness, with their immobility and theological imprecision the more conspicuous and their loyalty to religion as a social bond the more ingrained, despite the fact that their liturgical language was largely hieratic and incomprehensible to the people.8 Progress at this stage remained slow and barely conscious. No one particularly dictated that the many diaspora Germans should all become Lutherans, whereas Lutheranism failed almost everywhere else (except among some Slovaks) by 7

Contrast Wolff ’s stimulating and influential treatment, cf. below, p. 296. Some bibliography in Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, and id., in Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Bahlcke and Strohmeyer. Cf. Endre Arato´, A feuda´lis nemzetise´gto˝l a polga´ri nemzetig: a magyarorsza´gi nem magyar ne´pek nemzeti ideolo´gia´jańak elo˝zmeńyei (Bp., 1975). 8


105

1600; nor that Magyars, some of them at least, and for reasons still obscure, should alone continue to profess themselves Calvinist. Political as well as cultural factors came to determine the close association between Catholicism and the Polish nation, such that the ruling nobility was defined by its religion as much as by its language, and both contributed to a burgeoning sense of patriotism. Recruits to that class (any successful, and by the same token renegade, Ukrainian, for example) would normally take on both, and a whole tribal ideology of ‘Sarmatism’ grew up to feed its pretensions, its pride, even its xenophobia, though the outside world was an essential stimulus to self-recognition.9 In Habsburg Hungary, the more westerly parts of the country, a similar but weaker evolution of Landespatriotismus can be detected. The antithetical juxtaposition of East and West appears manifest in the stance of the clergy. Intellectuals, to whom education lent status—as against the aristocrats whose status was merely expressed in education—they embodied international movements, designed as universal remedies, with loyalties across frontiers to Rome, Wittenberg, or Geneva, cemented by travel. They were the guardians of Latinity, which guaranteed their own standing at home, as well as access to cosmopolitan interchange and contact. Yet they were also increasingly spokesmen for a smaller patria, for muffled formulations of local rights and traditions, inflated into theories of Slav, Sarmatian, or Illyrian grandeur, of unbroken descent from lustrous Romans or Huns. In the priestly estate, that is to say, openness of perception first became inseparable from narrowness of self-definition.10 Such was the position about 1750, as modernization began to make its impact on the region in the ways adverted to earlier. Enlightenment meant some avid readers of French and English literature (especially in Poland); but mainly pupils of the German Aufkla¨rung. At first its followers were still often clerics, influenced by Jansenism or Pietism. Its main significance for our purposes lies in the historical and critical, in many ways neo-humanist temper of its learning, and in the fact that during the early stages it remained firmly committed to foreign languages, Latin and German, for its expression. The swelling bureaucracy, along with economic management and educational reform, brought the rise of a new breed of graduates, so-called Honoratioren, who grew out of the clergy themselves (quite literally at times, with Jesuits dissolved and monasteries abolished) and sprang, as the clergy had always done, largely from middling groups in society. ˙ ycie codzienne szlachty polskiej w okresie sarmatyzmu (Szczeczin, 1998); most 9 Renata Galaj, Z recently: M. V. Leskinen, Mify i obrazy sarmatizma: istoki natsionalnoi ideologii Rechi Pospolitoi (Moscow, 2004). 10 There is no general study; but cf. Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600–60: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Ox., 2000); M. Craˇciun and O. Ghitta (ed.), Ethnicity and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe (Cluj, 1995); M. Craˇciun et al. (ed.), Confessional Identity in East-Central Europe (Aldershot, 2002). For the myths: A. S. Myl’nikov, Kartina slavianskogo mira: Vzgliad iz Vostochnoi Evropy: Etnogeneticheskie legendy, dogadki, protogipotezy, XVI–nachalo XVIII veka (St Petersburg, 1996).

106

The Rise of Nations

Sons of the lesser gentry, or of the artisanate in towns and villages, they partook of a background more mobile than average, and themselves became increasingly mobile. More jobs, more experiences, more contact with other cultures: all exposed them to at least mild versions of rationality and secularization. And they drew sustenance from widespread immigration into the area during the eighteenth century, mostly from Germany, but also from the Low Countries, France, and Italy.11 Now came the political spur as prime catalyst: the imperial claims of Vienna, and—in the Polish case—of St Petersburg and Berlin, too. They encountered three kinds of local response. The traditional noble commonwealths of Poland and Hungary displayed firm resistance, based on constitutional liberties and their coherent, comparatively large, ruling landed societies. Those societies were not uniform, indeed their weaknesses proved fatal to the immediate political struggle. In Poland reformers disputed with conservatives, during the decades which led up to final Partition (1795), over the role of the monarch, the extent of central controls over army, finance, administration, and the church. Hungary saw Magyar set against Magyar, Catholic against Calvinist, pro- and antiViennese factions provoked to complicated infighting associated in varying degrees with progressive and anti-progressive convictions. There, too, the outcome was hardly a blaze of national glory, rather an uneasy compromise after the death of Joseph II (1790) and a largely passive acquiescence in Habsburg policies for decades thereafter. Yet in both countries the ideologies thus forged would later re-emerge in fully-fledged ethnic guise.12 The second response, that of Bohemia and Croatia, may be deemed seminoble. Here, too, we find elements of historical right, though much obscurer ones, and a privileged class, but a smaller and less vibrant one, to embody them. In Bohemia the first stage of patriotism took the form of mild objections to Gleichschaltung from Vienna in the later eighteenth century; after fifty more years it would revive as a vogue for things Czech among some aristocrats, alongside numbers of educated burghers. The Croat body politic, concentrating on firm and essentially noble defence of its Latin and Catholic autonomies in 1790–1, later turned to advancing a claim for statehood on an ever more vernacular and secular base.13 In the third place there were the largely or completely unprivileged 11 Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen; Zolta ń Fallenbu¨chl, Ma´ria Tere´zia magyar hivatalnokai (Bp., 1989). Model study by Jań Hucˇko, Socia´lne zlozˇenie a poˆvod slovenskej obrodenskej inteligencie (Brat., 1974). 12 Most recently, for Poland: Lukowski, Liberty’s Folly; R. Butterwick (ed.), The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy in European Context, c.1500–1795 (Basingstoke, 2001). Hungary: E´va H. Bala´zs, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800: An Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism (Bp., 1997). 13 Most recently, on Bohemia: Hroch, Na prahu, and the op. posth. of Frantis ˇek Kutnar, Obrozenske´ vlastenectvı´ a nacionalismus: prˇ´ıspeˇvek k na´rodnı´mu a spolecˇenske´mu obsahu ˇcesˇstvı´ doby obrozenske´ (Pr., 2003, but written much earlier). Croatia: Wolfgang Kessler, Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft in Kroatien und Slawonien in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Historiographie und Grundlagen (Mun., 1981); Konrad Clewing, Staatlichkeit und nationale Identita¨tsbildung: Dalmatien in Vorma¨rz und Revolution (Mun., 2001).


107

communities, attaining to self-awareness without any platform of political estates. Their strivings were still, into the nineteenth century, borne by clerics: Slovak priests moving to liberal-Catholic or enlightened-Lutheran consciousness; Slovenes and Lithuanians engaged in small-scale programmes of awakening. The Orthodox nationalities represent a variant type within the same group, more or less peasants inside the Habsburg Monarchy, but gaining some separate identity across the frontier in the Balkans, as Serbs and Rumanians did, or partaking in certain elements of the Russian identity, as Ukrainians did vis-a`-vis the old Polish state and then its tsarist replacement.14 It was long customary to work with the distinction between ‘historic’ and ‘unhistoric’ nations in East-Central Europe. But I should like to stress here instead the similar forces which sustained all the movements just described. Though some clearly gained ground before others, and therefore induced a chain of reactions within the area, that is not really the point, any more than we can explain the whole phenomenon inside the Habsburg Monarchy as a response to attempted Germanization, when it was precisely rising ethnic consciousness which made state building look ‘Germanic’. In fact, national movements displayed a distinct tendency to move towards common ground: ideologies of privilege were the first to adopt overtly democratic propaganda—however little they might actually propose social reform—whereas the sponsors of protean cultures felt a continuing need to fabricate ancient rights, whether links with Dacians and Roman colonists, or Slavic empires, or voluntary contracts with conquering Magyars and Poles. Altogether the intellectual propagators of national identity were a comparatively homogeneous breed, which only sharpened their sense of mutual rivalry. As more advanced positions were reached in the age of the Romantics, so cultural perceptions grew still more uniform. Rousseau and Herder, Schelling and Hegel, Shakespeare, Byron, and Scott: all had their devotees and imitators, down to the immensely influential local fabulists of ancient civilizations and neoOssianic forgers. Herder enjoyed the greatest resonance of all, especially with his brief passages which extolled the noble traditions, wide horizons, and glorious future of the Slavs.15 That idea was not new; in fact it had been a cliche´ with a line of local writers since the sixteenth century; but no one had said it in Germany before. Now the emotional priority of language was firmly established, along with the ideal of the Volk, i.e. the peasantry, the uncorrupted ancient inhabitants, pure of speech and faithful to the soil. And what the peasant might eye as merely the recalcitrant native sod, became for a heightened sensibility the beauteous, age-old territory of the nation and scene of its stirring deeds. Simple 14 Slovaks, Slovenes; Serbs, Rumanians: below, ch. 8 etc. Lithuania and Ukraine: David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton, 1985); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, 2003). 15 Holm Sundhaussen, Der Einfluss der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Vo ¨lkern der Habsburger Monarchie (Mun., 1973). For the greatest of the counterfeiters, cf. R. J. W. Evans, ‘ ‘‘The Manuscripts’’: The Culture and Politics of Forgery’, in A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. G. H. Jenkins (Cardiff, 2005), 51–68.

108

The Rise of Nations

pristine heroes in hyper-patriotic landscape settings: such were the quintessential representations of that mood, in a remarkably standard genre of vernacular lyric and epic. Between the 1790s and the 1830s the bases for political operations changed little, but wider, more fervent audiences were won, and severer levels of animosity generated, partly the very effect of the charged vocabulary in which Romanticism indulged. Meanwhile, institutions sprang up to carry the growing weight of national sentiment: academies, Maticas (the cultural associations of the Slavs), publishers, journals, literary collections, museums, reading societies, and the rest.16

We have followed the outlines of an idea of nationality through several roughly specified phases: Renaissance and Reformation; Counter-Reformation; Enlightenment; Romanticism. Let me point to one last stage (for present purposes) of the evolution, when the perceptions of its spokesmen have become dominated by their received definitions. The 1830s and 1840s were an age of liberal and reforming aspirations. They throve in East-Central Europe on the benightedness and intolerance of regimes, as a political response to the effete conservative autocracy into which the Habsburg Monarchy and the other partitioning powers declined after the Napoleonic wars. The Hungarian diet witnessed a real struggle for social change, with a sprinkling of genuine radicals; similar moves took place in the Polish emigration. Popular programmes emerged among the Slavs, especially the bourgeois economic and constitutional demands of Czech national leaders. And yet most of this was stillborn, as 1848–9 would show, because predicated on the ideology of ethnic ressentiment: wilful mistrust and negative stereotypes had already hardened. When the time came, loyalties to the community (not necessarily to the best interests of that community) usually won out over broader commitments to material progress or advanced political participation. There were, after all, good grounds for that: antiquarian and Romantic tendencies necessarily yielded movements which best respected the preoccupations and material interests of intellectuals. The quest for self-sufficient national cultures and languages must pass through such a stage; and since political nationalism in the area grew directly out of rivalries at that stage, and could hardly develop further until at least 1918, its priorities likewise remained frozen. We are now in a position to reflect on the crucial group identified in this development. The educated e´lite enjoyed an intermediate but rising social status, boosted by the erudite ideal of humanism, by the priestly ideal of both Reformation and (particularly) Counter-Reformation, then by its amplified role in state administration, education, and economic expansion, and its contacts with a sprinkling of sympathetic aristocrats. The traditional guarantee of its 16 This subject is far too vast to annotate here, but for the Maticas, see T. Islamov (ed.), Slavianskie matitsy: XIX vek (2 vols., Moscow, 1996), and cf. Anna M. Drabek, in Vereinswesen und Geschichtspflege in den bo¨hmischen La¨ndern, [ed. M. Neumu¨ller] (Mun., 1986), 71–96.


109

exclusiveness lay in cosmopolitan opportunities: travel, study, correspondence, the mastery of foreign languages, living and dead. Yet the perception of European culture to which its members had access progressively led to a new definition of their place in it. An enhanced sense of the distinctiveness of their own ethnic group grew out of the flux caused by Joseph II, the French Revolution, and Napoleon, not least by the intellectual barriers set up within the western experience itself, and they increasingly saw their role as that of large fish in a small pond, rather than peripheral guests at a continental banquet. They felt the need for stability and order amid a crisis of traditional authority, both civil and spiritual. The native community could offer a refuge. Moreover, it might be the platform for greater influence, if reconstituted in terms of language and history, which scholars—rather than the traditional hierarchy, social or religious—would determine. Why else should they deliberately create enclaves, and by writing serious works in the vernacular, a vernacular often modelled on the pedantries of the Latin or German schoolroom, make a conscious virtue of provincialism? Thus the breakdown of a unified system of reference into mutually unintelligible disciplines was confirmed by the claims of mutually unintelligible languages to scholarly attention, a process already more subtly initiated at the time of the Reformation. Transmission, therefore, was also transformation (not to say translation), i.e. mediation between foreign and domestic, international currents and local concerns. At the same time it was mediation between new and old. The perception of modernization and its challenge was used to redefine communities and communal loyalties, sealing the gap between progress and reaction, dissolving the antithesis between change and tradition. When people talk loosely about nationalism as a new religion, they would do better to visualize it as a new direction for religious communities, where the common term between old and new versions was cultural and social rather than spiritual. Old loyalties, along with old antipathies, were generalized along lines of national cleavage, realizing the potential for conscious differentiation long stored up inside the familiar order.17 Once set in motion, things moved with astonishing speed. A period of two generations or so sufficed, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, during which time the historian is struck above all by the highly subjective, almost random character of the decisions taken. These mobile and articulate polyglots did not act under the constraint of a preordained ‘mother-tongue’ or mother culture. Rather they possessed two and more Umgangssprachen, or languages of communication (to adopt the parlance of later statisticians), and more than one kind of cultural awareness.18 The very insight into two or several possible ethnic affiliations frequently made them cleave the more pridefully and fiercely to one alone. Nationalism became largely a matter of defining a single identity, eliminating the claims of other cultures and languages 17

Cf. below, ch. 9.

18

Cf. Evans, ‘Language and State-Building’.

110

The Rise of Nations

with which the individual was familiar, including the cosmopolitan demands— and temptations—of international scholarship, ecclesiastical bonds, or the classical tradition. Take the Magyar leadership in the 1830s and 1840s: Szećhenyi, Kossuth, Eo¨tvo¨s, Peto˝fi. Take the Poles of the generation of Lelewel and Mickiewicz, tensed by the extra dynamic of emigration, as they clung to Polish values in a foreign environment. Take the musical trio of Liszt, Chopin, and Smetana. Take the many cases among Austrian Slavs. There, too, we find a large number of ‘converts’: from Dobrovsky´, who thought himself Bohemian but always wrote, and usually spoke, in German, to the next generation of Czechs by deliberate choice; the circle around Frantisˇek Palacky´, a sort of amphibious Czechoslovak, perfectly at home with Hungarian, and sufficiently Germanic for the parliamentarians at Frankfurt in 1848 notoriously to account him one of their own; the men around Ljudevit Gaj, the more-or-less German-born founder of a movement which persuaded Croats to abandon Latin in favour of a quasiSerbian patois.19 The variants and intricacies are endless. But the Slavs have the added interest that they evolved a distinctive ideology to keep the poles of cosmopolitan and particular in fruitful interaction. Such were the origins of the famous notion of pan-Slavism, which later took on a political and diplomatic life of its own. Pan-Slavs believed in the brotherhood of all Slavs, who shared at root one language, common ancestry, a rich and heroic past. The theory rested partly on Enlightenment speculation, partly on Romantic conceits, partly on a conscious anti-Germanism which yet nurtured Herder’s prophecy. Be it noted here that pan-Slavism grew first, not out of Russian or Polish requirements, nor even primarily out of Czech ones, but out of the needs of the tiny and insecure community of Slovaks, whose spokesmen Kolla´r and Sˇafa´rik gave it classic exposition, and out of almost equally insignificant Croatia, where Gaj’s partial, Yugoslav version of ‘Illyrism’ evolved. By means of it small men, heading small communities, could yet partake of wholeness.20 This was a notable vision, humanity mingled with tribalism; but also a grandiose piece of mysticism. Whereas it was a libel (but a suggestive one) by their enemies that when the representatives of pan-Slavism assembled in Prague to debate the political issues raised by the annus mirabilis of 1848, their deliberations had to be conducted in German (until they were broken off by gunshot 19 For Dobrovsky ´ , still standard: Vincenc Brandl, Zˇivot Josefa Dobrovske´ho (Brno, 1883). For Palacky´, now Korˇalka, Frantisˇek Palacky´; and cf. the revealing German-language correspondence with his wife: Briefe an Therese: Korrespondenz von Frantisˇek Palacky´ mit seiner Braut und spa¨teren Frau aus den Jahren 1826–60, ed. J. Korˇalka (Dresden, 2003). For Gaj: Elinor M. Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (Boulder, Colo., 1975). 20 The whole subject needs a new treatment. Standard is still Alfred Fischel, Der Panslawismus bis zum Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1919), though Fischel was a rather hostile commentator. Cf. L’. Holotı´k (ed.), L’udovı´t Sˇtu´r und die slawische Wechselseitigkeit (Brat., 1969). Waspish appraisal by Vaćlav Cˇerny´, Vy´voj a zlocˇiny panslavismu (Pr., 1994). Cf. below, pp. 142 ff., 158, 250.


111

from a Habsburg general), they did encounter considerable impediments to communication.21 A postulated Ursprache had broken into fragments. The opposite problem was commoner in practice: constructing standard literary languages out of rampant dialect. Polish and Magyar—for different reasons— had the easiest task (which helps to explain their faster national development). Things were hardest for Slovaks, Serbs and Croats, Ukrainians. Again a series of subjective, though often erudite decisions were called for, with heated debates into the 1850s among scholars, who then handed them down to a populace whose consciousness they had set themselves to mould.22 Once the choices were made, linguistic practice hardened, national cultural edifices came under rapid construction, and the pattern of self-definition was largely complete. Much scope remained for personal ‘conversions’ (and Jewish assimilation would soon add a new chapter to that); more and more commonly non-intellectuals might face the decision too. But the notion took firm root that ‘mother tongue’ (henceforth seen as an objective datum) was an essential vehicle for the cultural maturity of the individual—an implausible view, on previous evidence, indeed almost the reverse of traditional assumptions, though we can detect its ancestry in Enlightenment concern for popular education.23 Now that claims had been staked and the boundaries mapped, a further stage was reached of impopulation by hard-headed monoglots seeking office, economic advantage, and political influence. They might also seek genuine social and constitutional reform, since it is conspicuous that political radicals tended to be extremer nationalists than moderates. At all events, it is conspicuous too that the kind of diversity, however compartmentalized, which seems to be theoretically implied by the doctrine of mother tongue, rarely bore fruit in fact. Instead the power interests of dominant nationalities held sway, and recalcitrant minorities were forced to swim with the tide, while their ideologues nursed the grievances of the clan for future settlement. But the problems of state building in the region belong largely to the years after 1849, and need not concern us here. One general qualification is called for, to round off this argument. My reader should not think that East-Central European national movements, while increasingly uniform in their common parallel development, were at all harmonious within. Indeed, the stronger their foundations and the more numerous their camp-followers, the greater became the tendency for feuding over social, religious, and territorial issues. We find plenty of gradations of democracy among patriots, many clashes over the claims of church and state, much dissension about where leadership should be located and how exercised. Again, Lawrence D. Orton, The Prague Slav Congress of 1848 (Boulder, Colo., 1978), 60 ff. Background in A. M. Schenker et al. (ed.), The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development (New Haven, 1980); R. Picchio et al. (ed.), Aspects of the Slavic Language Question (2 vols., New Haven, 1984). 23 German evidence in Hans-Dieter Erlinger and Clemens Knobloch, Muttersprachlicher Unterricht im 19. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zu seiner Genese und Institutionalisierung (Tu¨bingen, 1991). 21 22

112

The Rise of Nations

new concerns blended with old: while confessional divisions, still sharp within some groups (notably among Magyars, Slovaks, and Rumanians) tended to recede, the pressures on widely differentiated societies (notably among Poles, Magyars, Croats, and Rumanians) tended to intensify. And again the form of the contests was largely given by the intellectual challenge of the West and local responses to it. Perhaps that point is most tellingly exemplified by the Orthodox communities. There, forces of change had to wage an at times bitter struggle against the old religious e´lite, and secular values played an important part in national awakening—especially by creating popular literary vernaculars—even though their purveyors were often clerics. At the same time Serbs and Rumanians already had in the Balkans some elements of national independence. Yet ethnic identity was still created largely through their cosmopolitan intellectual leaders in the Habsburg lands, more intimate participants in the dialogue between West and East. With good reason their early journals and treatises appeared in Vienna or Pest. When Dositej Obradovic´, self-appointed protagonist of modern Serbian culture, heard of the rebellion against the Turks by his co-religionaries south of the Danube, he hastened to send to Belgrade his proposals for a national education system. They met with a blank response. None of the insurgent commanders could read them.24

What wider conclusions appear to follow from an examination of the EastCentral European experience of rising nationality? I would stress the intermediate position of that experience between the ‘mature’ but milder nationalism of Western Europe, fundamentally different because coloured by all manner of time-honoured institutional loyalties to the state, and the nationalism imported, mainly during the twentieth century, to places which were never committed to European values in the first place. In Warsaw, Prague, or Pest the goals of the West seemed intelligible, attainable; many thoughtful people showed little attachment to the residual ‘exotic’ qualities of life in Poland or Hungary at the time. Yet those goals were also distant and dangerous. Self-definition in light of them was also self-defence. The outcome could not lie in appeals to state patriotism, since there were no recognizable ‘states’ in the east of the continent. But the movements were not entirely stateless either, since they almost always invoked ancient rights and claims for territorial continuity. Just as practical programmes for independence, or for fuller involvement of the inert mass of the peasantry, remained at a premium, so did the kind of genuinely philosophical arguments for national sovereignty so prominent in Germany. Yet the debate engendered in East-Central Europe had its 24 Nikola Radojc ˇic´, ‘Dositejevo pismo o uredjenju i prosvecenju Srbije’, Letopis Matice Srpske, 96 (1914–21), 8–31; cf. Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadzˇic´, 1787–1864: Literacy, Literature and National Independence in Serbia (Ox., 1970), 42, 54 f.


113

constructive and original side, especially in the discussions about federalism which took place at mid-century: Palacky´, for example, advancing his view of the nation as a providential safeguard against the advance of bureaucratized uniformity; or Eo¨tvo¨s, Magyar patriot, but acid critic of the sleight-of-hand whereby ‘fraternity’ was being replaced in the famous triad by nationality, and liberty and equality refashioned as a consequence.25 Some compromise was of course dictated by the notoriously variegated settlement pattern in the east of the continent. That made all definition doubly difficult, though it may also, per contra, have contributed to the speed with which national identities consolidated themselves, once the initial impetus had been supplied. It lay likewise at the root of an obsession with language as the badge par excellence of belonging to a group: hardly the outcome of philological speculation a` la Kant, Herder, or Humboldt; rather the crisis of a plethora of vernaculars, from some half-a-dozen diverse families, over such a comparatively small area. Again we come up against the fragility of all criteria for an objective determination of communal allegiance. Yet by 1848 such allegiance had become a social, intellectual, and psychological necessity, and when national barriers were once erected, the utmost effort was made to cover the traces, to obscure the conscious and contingent nature of their construction. It grew easy, though it was always misconceived, to project back modern ethnic categories into earlier periods, across the shifting sands of Enlightenment and Romanticism, ignoring on one hand the addition and subtraction which had taken place, on the other hand the essentially religious nature of earlier loyalties, and provoking detractors into the denial, equally misconceived, that those earlier loyalties had possessed any ‘national’ character at all. Religion perpetrated its own mischief, by bequeathing emotive confessional antipathies, especially its notions of orthodoxy and conversion, of heresy and apostasy, which so burdened the formative phase of patriotic awakening. If we need a short conclusion, a schematic nutshell may serve. The process was one of redefinition of existing communities over time. That took place through a perception over space, the perception of a familiar civilization, but also of estrangement from it, part voluntary, part involuntary. And its instigators were simultaneously bearers of both the public mind of the communities and the values of the civilization. There operated a kind of dialectic, with the West as antithesis. Or perhaps the homelier metaphors of physics are more appropriate: as in Franklin’s experiment where an electric current is made to jump across two parallel metal rods, intellectuals picked up the charge from new ideas in the West, carried it home over a narrow gap, and thereby generated both the light and the heat of national self-awareness. 25 Palacky ´ , Radhost, esp. iii. 43–70; also in German in his Gedenkbla¨tter (Pr., 1874). For Eo¨tvo¨s, see now the trans., by D. Mervyn Jones, of his magnum opus as The Dominant Ideas of the Nineteenth Century and their Impact on the State (Boulder, Colo., 1996–8).

7 Frontiers and National Identities in Central-European History Borders and their synonyms have become vogue words in current discourse about perceptions, identity, and ‘otherness’. Yet the terms originated in various kinds of physical barrier or marker which divided territory, and this essay attempts to sketch out their genealogy in Central Europe. It shows how traditional or ‘historic’ frontiers gradually took on broader functions, and had an enhanced impact on peoples who lived on either side of them. But this process was redirected in the early modern age by a rival tendency to establish ahistorical or ‘artificial’ frontiers, determined by political or administrative fiat, from peace settlements with the Turks through the Silesian wars and the Partitions of Poland to the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic redraftings of the map. By that stage the territorial claims of the national principle began to assert themselves with ever greater intensity, and this set the agenda for a continuing tension between historic and artificial frontiers, real and proposed, over the last two centuries.

One of the two leading terms in my title may appear much simpler than the other. Talk of ‘national identities’ conjures up—as we have just seen—a complex of problems associated with divergent senses of the term ‘nation’, as well as with the question how ‘identities’ are constructed, and by whom. In contrast, the notion of a ‘frontier’ is surely a firmer, more clear-cut one, hardly standing in need of explication. The current edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains no entry either for the word ‘frontier’ or for its cognates (‘border’, ‘boundary’). Yet that assumption, I shall hope to show, is a deceptive one; and the troubled relationship between ‘nation’ and ‘frontier’ represents a significant theme over a long span of European, especially Central-European history which is too rarely addressed in its own right.1 Originally printed in International History Review, 14 (1992), 480–502. I was very grateful to several audiences for their comments on successive drafts of this paper, especially to Prof. Franz Szabo and his colleagues at Carleton University, Ottawa, where a version of it had been delivered as a public lecture in September 1990. 1 A useful recent collection, mainly for Germany, which touches on some of the issues raised here, is W. Schmale and R. Stauber (ed.), Menschen und Grenzen in der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Berlin, 1998).

Frontiers and National Identities

115

Modern peacemakers have often found, or claimed to find, a radical solution: draw (or redraw) the frontier to fit the nation, the contemporary ethnic nation. In fact, their solution harks back to very ancient arrangements: the first staking-out of tribal boundaries at the end of the Vo¨lkerwanderung, the migration of peoples through dark-age Europe; and the first establishment of a pattern of primitive political units. In between lie long centuries of a tradition which still retains much life, in the New World as in the Old, of building or extending the nation to fit the frontier. The politicians of Versailles and Potsdam could act as they did because perceptions of the frontier, of its meaning and purpose, had changed. The idea of the frontier, in other words, has its own history. A frontier is, etymologically, what ‘fronts’ on another territory, or on the wilderness, with the strong implication in present-day parlance of a major, national, inter-state demarcation. But that meaning subsumes lesser, more localized meanings, and the whole terminology of the subject is correspondingly overlapping and imprecise. Thus we have the most important Central-European term, the German ‘Grenze’, which remains quite ambiguous as to whether it denotes a greater or lesser division, or indeed any kind of limit. The other words we use derive from the early days of medieval settlement—border, boundary, mark, etc.—and long continued to have Latin equivalents (metae, termini, fines, limites) which would be employed in the written record. Whatever term was applied, its chief underlying ambiguity consisted in the interplay from the first between twin poles of fluidity and firmness about the idea of a border. On the one hand, the frontier was a vague and perhaps shifting no man’s land, essentially imprecise, and frequently associated with topographical barriers of mountain, forest, or swamp. On the other hand, it was a physical bound, from the large-scale limes, dyke, or row of prominent stones, to small and inconspicuous local markers. Thus the origins of the word ‘Grenze’ lie, not in the vocabulary of Teutonic conquest, as might be expected, but in the granica, a term connoting the simple frontier dispositions of the—often retreating—Slavs: shaped objects of some kind, perhaps originally piles of wood (the Czech cognate, hranice, also describes Jan Hus’s funeral pyre at Constance in 1415).2 Moreover, fluidity and firmness formed part of the same perception. The German ‘Mark’, with its Slavonic equivalent ‘mez’ and its rough synonyms like ‘Flur’, could describe either a linear border or a swathe of terrain. Most striking of all is the Hungarian word ‘hata´r’, since that term, first applied by Magyar horsemen to the limit of their advance, came to mean the common fields surrounding the village, while continuing to serve to this day as the only Hungarian expression for a frontier. The fluidity continued for many centuries, especially along larger, more important frontiers, like that between France and the German 2 I. I. Sreznevskij, Slovar’ drevnerusskogo yazyka, i (1893, repr. Moscow, 1989), cols. 584 f.; Jan Gebauer, Slovnı´k starocˇesky´, i (1900–7, repr. Pr., 1970), 485; Słownik staropolski, ii (Wrocław, 1956–9), 483–8. Cf. H.-J. Karp, Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa wa¨hrend des Mittelalters (Cologne/V., 1972).

116

The Rise of Nations

Empire, as well as in regions where temporary migration or transhumance made for particularly permeable divides. Gradually, however, greater precision and definition, at first more typical of lesser, local boundaries, tended to gain ground: literally so too, since the prime cause was the spread of settled farming, especially arable cultivation, but also the more efficient exploitation of pastures and forests. The process was no merely pragmatic one, but included significant cultural concomitants. In ancient Rome boundary stones had been set up with sacrifices, to pacify the earth gods and lay a curse on disturbers. They were placed under the patronage of Terminus, god of landmarks, whose feast-day—Terminalia—fell on 23 February: ‘Without you, Terminus, there would be endless quarrel about land’, wrote Ovid.3 All over medieval Europe we find similar symbolism, now Christianized. Borders were marked ceremoniously by stones (Grenzsteine), indented trees (Malbaüme, Lochbaüme), arrows or crosses on poles; often just by mounds of earth (cumuli), stacks of logs, even mere bound sheaves; sometimes by figures or religious statues (Weichbilder, Weitbilder). They were maintained through regular inspection, known in German as Grenzbegang: a perambulation—carried out by Um- or Unterga¨nger—with cultic features, especially involving children and their symbolic chastisement, so that they should remember the exact locations into their old age. One seventeenth-century English bequest provided that, during the reading of the will after the bounds had been beaten, food should be served, on condition that one boy stood on his head throughout the proceedings.4 The sacral function of borders interests ethnographers, of course; residually it survives today. And, for once, its timeless aspect should concern historians too, since the arbitrary frontiers of initial conquest and settlement became thereby customary, established, accepted. After centuries of existence they came to be perceived as age-old and unchanging. Most of them actually were, going back in eastern parts of Germany to the thirteenth or twelfth centuries at least, in the west perhaps to the seventh or the sixth.5 Ecclesiastical ones might be oldest of all, like those French dioceses which derived from provincial organization in Roman Gaul. Furthermore, borders were real to people at an essentially local level. The fundamental historical frontier was, and remained into the modern period, that of the manor—and nowhere more conspicuously than in Central Europe, where the manorial nexus of lord and peasant (Herrschaft) proved so persistent, and where the autonomies of towns, many of them very small, became so deeply entrenched. Fasti, ii. 639 ff.; Cf. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Ro¨mer (2nd edn., Mun., 1912), 136 ff. J. H. Zedler (ed.), Großes vollsta¨ndiges Universal Lexicon (54 vols., Halle/Leipzig, 1732–50), xi. 831–43, 848–57; Das Rechtswahrzeichen, pt.2: Grenzrecht und Grenzzeichen, ed. K. S. Bader (Freiburg i.B., 1940); L.Takaćs, Hata´rjelek, hata´rja´ra´s a feuda´lis kor ve´geń Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1987), a fascinating study. The English example is drawn from Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edn., L., 1911), iv. 32; cf. Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Ox., 1994), 34 f., 85, 99, 105 f., 142 f., 175 f., 217 f., 247. 5 Gu ¨ nther Franz, Historische Kartographie (2nd edn., Hanover, 1962), 16 f. 3 4


117

Borders were evidently there to be crossed; and tariffs afford the clearest yardstick of their significance in this respect. In France, at least 1,500 internal river tolls were estimated to exist in 1789, for all Colbert’s attempts at elimination. The small city of Valence on the Rhoˆne was alone surrounded by 144 toll stations. Germany had even more: some sixty imposts were levied along the Rhine in the sixteenth century, such that wheat trebled in price between Mannheim and the Dutch frontier. Things were worse still on the Elbe, where in 1685 fifty-four planks of timber out of sixty went to meet dues between Saxony and Hamburg, and the journey took four weeks as a consequence, rather than eight days. Eighteenth-century Bavaria had nearly 500 toll stations, large and small, levying at different and arbitrary rates.6 Yet at the same time the comparative impermeability of borders marked genuine divisions, which might be legal or social, cultural or economic. Examples of each of these categories are, first, the jurisdiction of landowner and village judge, as in the Weistu¨mer or village law codes of Central Europe, with their endlessly divergent provisions; secondly, patterns of farming, field systems, and so forth; thirdly, the more notional, but no less significant, gradations in religious organization and practice, from parish to parish; and, finally, aspects of production and trade. Again the economic factors are the most measurable. When the territory of the Cumanians and Jazygians, in the middle of the Hungarian plain, redeemed itself from seigneurial control in 1745 by means of a land tax, each separate community assessed its quota by a different measure of area. The modest-sized German state of Baden, as late as 1810, had 65 dry measures, 80 pound weights, 92 square measures, 112 standards of length, 123 liquid and 163 cereal measures.7 Characteristic of ancien re´gime Central Europe in particular was the concomitant political fragmentation, with the Holy Roman Empire and its hundreds of constituent territories as locus classicus. Even manors were frequently quasi-state boundaries in Germany: witness the lands of the imperial knights (Reichsritter); the tiny free cities of Swabia; or the ancient bounds of imperial abbeys, where secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions coincided—more or less. This was a chequerwork, at the lowest level, of minute enclaves and exclaves. But that also applied further east, as with the thirteen towns of the Zips/Szepesse´g/ Spisˇ region, which formed several tiny parcels of non-contiguous territory in the north of Hungary, pawned for centuries to the king of Poland. Moreover, large aristocrats there, whose German equivalent would be a sovereign prince of the Empire, had similar freedom to play fast and loose with civil administration. Some of the Esterha´zy lands straddled the Austro-Hungarian border, so that the Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism (2 vols., Eng. trans., L., 1934), i. 56 ff. Istvań Gya´rfa´s, ‘Re´gi ja´szkun te´rme´rte´kek’, Sz. 14 (1880), 679–83; cf. in general, I. Bogdań (comp.), Magyarorsza´gi hossz- és fo¨ldme´rte´kek, 1601–1874 (Bp., 1990), who notes, for example (276–322), forty-one different values for the commonest Hungarian measure of area (the hold), the largest fifteen times bigger than the smallest. For Baden, Heckscher, Mercantilism, i. 118. 6 7

118

The Rise of Nations

state frontier was effectively deflected; similarly with the Liechtensteins at the boundary of Austria and Moravia. When Count Ignaz Dominik Chorinsky built a new dining-room on to his castle in the 1780s, jutting out over a little river near Troppau, he furnished a good subject for party conversation: ten of his guests feasted in Moravia, ten in Austrian Silesia, and ten in Prussian Silesia.8 Above the individual manor stood the assemblage of manors into a county or province. In Germany many of these were fully sovereign, for example Baden already mentioned, or Ansbach, with its twenty-nine land tolls in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere they formed the building-blocks of larger polities, foci for sturdy local self-management: like the fourteen or so Bohemian kraje (circles) or the fifty-plus Hungarian megye´k, whose name—usually translated as ‘county’ or ‘comitat’—again combined etymologically the tighter and looser senses of a root word for frontier.9 Diocesan and similar boundaries within the church played a comparable role. Such boundaries were likewise time-honoured, and could enshrine the same historical fissiparousness, as in the case of the extraordinary county of Felso˝ Fehe´r, which comprised sixteen unconnected small pieces of the Transylvanian jigsaw. At the top, or most general, level came the state frontier. But, as we have seen, this was often identical with lesser borders and certainly coterminous with them. States could shift their boundaries through war, inheritance, or swap; but on such occasions—and the point deserves to be stressed—local boundaries and lesser jurisdictions usually remained intact: given manors or counties were swallowed entire by their new ruler, like Jonah by the whale. We can think of the whole development as a palimpsest of civil and ecclesiastical borders, whose lowest layers were almost always long-standing and broadly accepted (even when fiercely disputed in detail—and such disputes themselves tended to assume a chronic character). Besides, all these borders looked much the same on the ground. The great German Encyclopaedia of Zedler (1730s), listing twelve species of Grenze, reports that all territories and estates are ‘enclosed and inscribed with regular marker stones and public waymarks’.10 Perhaps that expresses the wish rather than the reality, for the entry goes on to say that borders should be indicated with ‘gewappnete Steine’ (armorial stones), and preferably measured, entered in a special record (a Lager- or Salbuch), and secured by regular perambulation or, if necessary, arbitration. The ancient and significant frontier between Styria and Hungary (to which we shall return) certainly had numbered boulders along part of its length by the later 8 K. Lechner and F. Huter (ed.), Handbuch der historischen Sta ¨ sterreich (2 vols., Stuttgart, ¨ tten: O 1966–70), i. 706 (Esterha´zy); the most important Liechtenstein latifundium stretched from Feldsberg (Lower Austria) to Eisgrub [Lednice] (Moravia). Cf. Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 168. For Chorinsky: Kroupa, Alchymie ˇsteˇstı´, 127. 9 Bohuslav Rieger, Zr ˇ´ızenı´ krajske´ v Cˇechaćh (2 vols., Pr., 1889–92); Gy. Kristo´, A va´rmegye´k kialakula´sa Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1988). 10 ‘ . . . mit ordentlichen Mark-Steinen und o ¨ ffentlichen Gemercken eingesteint und unterschrieben’: Zedler, Lexicon, xi. cols. 831–43.


119

eighteenth century, even some with letters on them (‘M[etae] R[egni] H[ungariae]’ and ‘M[etae] D[ucatus] S[tyriae]’).11 But essentially it underwent the same procedures of delineation and inspection as any lesser boundary. By that time the issues were becoming clearer, thanks above all to cartography. European map-making evolved in a paradigm opposite to that evinced by the borders themselves. It began, in the sixteenth-century cosmographies, mainly with the largest entities (where it defined any territories at all) and on the smallest scale. Gradually it moved, with the Englishman, John Speed, as perhaps the greatest pioneer, to delimit areas of middling size: from the mid-seventeenth century greater precision and detail enter German map-making, and even Hungarian counties have their borders indicated. But only the eighteenth century saw the introduction of really accurate surveying techniques. Again, pioneers came from the west of the continent, in the Cassini family, responsible for the French national map survey.12 But Germans followed close behind, especially Johann Baptist Homann (1664–1724), the cartographical entrepreneur of Nuremberg, and above all Adam Friedrich Zu¨rner (1680–1742), a Saxon parson—at least until he was unfrocked for neglect of his flock in his obsession with measurement and triangulation. As ‘Electoral Saxon and Royal Polish Geographer, Land and Border Commissioner’, Zu¨rner travelled some 18,000 old German miles recording distances with his ‘geometrischer Wagen’ or odometer, and compiling the monumental atlas of Saxony which was pirated for publication after his death. In the beautiful maps of Zu¨rner and others—which sold at about the weekly wage of a cook, with a 25 per cent surcharge for hand-colouring—we can study boundaries at the level of province, county, and Amt (to use the equivalent Saxon term), with their dotted or barred lines, none of them quite straight, even though at the micro-level, from one post or stone to the next, they must have been. And in the form of accurate estate maps, burgeoning after 1700, which recorded every cumulus or border-stone, cartography at last came to reflect most people’s actual experience of the frontier.13

11 Orsza ´gos Leve´lta´r [National Archives: hereafter ‘OL’], Budapest, A 115, csomo´ [bundle] 6, fos. 37 ff. 12 J. W. Konvitz, Cartography in France, 1660–1848: Science, Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago, 1987); Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, 1989); id., ‘National Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 1423–51, at 1428 ff. passim. 13 Zu ¨ rner: Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. liv (Leipzig, 1900), 511–14. His Hungarian equivalent was Samuel Mikoviny, on whom see A Hungaria Nova megrajzolo´ja, Mikoviny Sa´muel, ed. A. A. Dea´k (Bp., 1987). E. Ja¨ger, Bibliographie zur Kartengeschichte von Deutschland und Osteuropa (Lu¨neburg, 1978), 69 ff., discusses eighteenth-century prices. A. Papp-Va´ry and P.Hrenko´, Magyarorsza´g re´gi te´rke´peken (Bp., 1989), is a remarkable cartographical enterprise which reproduces many significant estate maps (see, for present purposes, esp. 92 ff., 102 ff., 110 f., 118 f.). For the English experience: Roger J. P. Kain and Elizabeth Baigent, The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State: A History of Property Mapping (Chicago, 1992).

120

The Rise of Nations

Here I reach base camp for the next stage of my argument. Cartography was not an autonomous intellectual discipline. It reflected the influence of the Enlightenment, that ‘quantifying spirit of the eighteenth century’ which sought the ordered and rational investigation of nature.14 At the same time it reflected the influence of the state which, on the one hand, employed its surveyors and other experts to identify resources and establish an efficient basis for tax assessment, while, on the other hand, provoking or cajoling landowners to undertake their own cadastres and terriers. These two stimuli were most powerfully conjoined in enlightened absolutism, the governmental system of Frederick the Great in Prussia, Joseph II in Austria, and other hyperactive rulers of the ‘well-ordered police states’ of Central Europe in their highest phase. Thus we encounter—somewhat belatedly, the reader may feel—the second component in the title of this chapter. For the state-building endeavours of enlightened absolutism were directed towards the creation of a national community, breaking down privileges and vested interests in favour of notions of citizenship and patriotism. Rulers and ruling groups displayed a new awareness of the values of community and the common good, and of the need to harness the rising power of public opinion to that end. The consciousness stirred in them of the idea of a nation: not conceived at this stage, by governments or by most of their opponents, in any ethnic sense, but as the territorial nation, the ‘national’ (rather than ‘international’ or ‘provincial’) commonalty of citizens in a given geopolitical entity.15 Borders were crucial to this identification. They represented the organic, historic bounds of a given country, defining it with greater or lesser precision vis-a`-vis its neighbours, a vehicle for the emergent patriotic sentiment of the Enlightenment and beyond. Best placed to set herself off against the rest of Europe was England, or perhaps Britain, given the obvious, but often overlooked, role of the Channel in her self-perception. Contrast Central Europe, with its absurdly intricate, even overlapping frontiers, which sometimes amounted to no more than a series of command districts: fluctuating physical limits of overlordship and hazy borders of receding direct legal authority. Best placed domestically was again England, where local jurisdictions and tolls were early tamed by central authority—ironically the very word ‘custom’ came to be applied to a state-controlled (inter)national impost. Here too, Central-European polities could only limp along in the same direction, asserting some uniformity as best they might. On tolls little progress was made; on legal approximation rather more.16 But everywhere governments attempted to enhance the major 14 Cf. T. Fra ¨ngsmyr et al. (ed.), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1990), though this collection contains nothing on Central Europe except an essay on ‘scientific’ forest management in Germany. 15 See also above, p. 69 and below, ch. 8; and cf., for Austria, Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen, 57 ff.; and for Germany: Prignitz, Vaterlandsliebe und Freiheit; O. Dann (ed.), Nationalismus in vorindustrieller Zeit (Mun., 1986); id. and Dinwiddy (ed.), Nationalism. 16 Heckscher, Mercantilism, records so little success on the customs front in Central Europe that his thesis of its crucial role in state building comes to look almost paradoxical. The legal issues,


121

border against the minor one—national at the expense of provincial, or provincial at the expense of manorial—and to strengthen its functions. The blossoming of cartography, and of geographical instruction generally, revealed itself as a handmaiden of such state authority. Distant frontiers could be imagined for the first time; and broad bands of colour now underlined their visual effect, as did the beginnings of uniform territorial coloration—we may recall the crude psychological impact of the red surface tint on British world maps in the days of empire. Maps also help us to conceive of a further important dimension to this goal of enlightened absolutists. Their notions of regulation, of policing (Polizei), of welfare, and so forth, involved essentially an extension of municipal organization into the national sphere: as the burgher became a citizen—and German employs the same word for both—traditions of civic virtue, administration, and enterprise were transferred to the framework of the territorial state.17 Again the frontier formed a significant aspect: consider the tightly drawn bounds of German boroughs on the innumerable town-plans of the early modern period, the sharpest cartographical features of the time (even if settlement patterns were messier in reality, as suburbs grew up outside the walls). Of course, merchants had their fluid boundaries too, in the shape of wide trading horizons; but the hermetic confines of the city were surely the model for eighteenth-century state builders. The dictates of enlightened rationality and of absolutist control thus stimulated major efforts to promote and intensify the historic frontier, as with the massive border surveys undertaken by Habsburg rulers from the 1740s and their symbolic accoutrements. From the late 1760s, the imperial eagle was displayed—alongside provincial or royal arms, as the case might be—at all crossingpoints into the Austrian lands.18 Yet there is a crucial contradiction here: for the very forces of Enlightenment and absolutism which worked to accentuate historic frontiers also began to undermine their legitimacy. A different kind of frontier came to assert its claims. I must stress: this was not the ‘natural’ frontier so freely canvassed by posterity, especially in relation to French ambitions on the Rhine, the Alps, and the embracing both imperial and state legislation, are much too complicated to be entered into here. But cf. Michael Stolleis, Geschichte des o¨ffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland, vol. i: Reichspublizistik und Policeywissenschaften, 1600–1800 (Mun., 1988); and, for policies within a single group of territories, Henry Strakosch, State Absolutism and the Rule of Law: The Struggle for the Codification of Civil Law in Austria, 1753–1811 (Sydney, 1967). 17 The deservedly influential work by M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, 1983), is relevant here, though it hardly addresses the dynamics of this development. 18 Papp-Va ´ry and Hrenko´, Magyarorsza´g, 112 f. Evidence of an enhanced governmental involvement in establishing and maintaining accurate information about frontiers abounds in the archives: e.g. OL, A 115, N 80–92, 121–2. An outstanding example, in the case of the Hungarian-Austrian border already touched upon, is the map by C. J. Walter (1754–6), now in the War Archives in Vienna: cf. I. Kretschmer et al. (ed.), Lexikon zur Geschichte der Kartographie (2 vols., V., 1986), i. 276. The French ministry of war began mapping French borders in the 1740s (Konvitz, Cartography).

122

The Rise of Nations

Pyrenees from the days of Richelieu through those of Louis XIV to the Revolution. First, there is precious little evidence that France genuinely cared about physical features as such: rather she found new justifications for traditional dynastic ambition.19 Secondly, and more importantly, natural boundaries were nothing new, and they were not necessarily at all clear-cut. That is fairly obvious in the case of wild mountain chains, dense forest, or treacherous swamps, still scarcely penetrated and imperfectly surveyed. It is less obvious, and worth dwelling on for a moment, with the most familiar and widespread of all physical borders: the river. River frontiers in fact generated all manner of complex disputes: over water transport and its regulation; over fords, bridges, and their maintenance; over mills, fishing, and other riparian rights; over flooding, or conversely over drainage; even—the toughest problems of all—over changing locations of the bed of the stream. The ancient, and in its larger features unquestioned, Austro-Hungarian border was partially riverine, and those sections most gave rise to litigation: protracted arguments about shifting islands at the confluence of the Danube and the March, and elsewhere, and, further south, about the course of the little rivers Leitha and Lafnitz. One Austrian community, for example, protests in the later eighteenth century that the Hungarian side has dug a new channel to cut off its access to the water meadows.20 No, the rival to a historic frontier was not a natural one, but its converse: an artificial frontier; the revival by those in power of the original, arbitrary delineation of boundaries, now in the quite different and sophisticated guise of a conscious policy to restructure existing borders in the interests of those two priorities of eighteenth-century governments, enlightened rationality and absolutist militarism. New artificial frontiers, if based on survey lines, especially straight ones, would obviate the myriad complexities and uncertainties, the inefficiency and superstition generated by tradition, in this as in other areas of human experience; if based on strategic considerations, they would allow the expanded armies of the age to adapt to the logistic requirements of contemporary campaigning. It is no accident that in 1764 the Viennese War Council should underline the need for more accurate maps: The experiences of the late [Seven Years] war have persuasively shown how indispensable for the army is precise information about those regions where fighting takes place. Yet although the war took place largely on our own soil, we knew more about foreign terrain 19 Gaston Zeller, La Re únion de Metz a` la France (2 vols., Paris, 1926); id., La France et l’Allemagne depuis dix sie`cles (Paris, 1932); id., ‘La Monarchie d’ancien re´gime et les frontie`res nationales’, Revue d’histoire moderne, 8 (1933), 305–33. Cf. N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe, 1500–1840 (Cambridge, 1979), 177 f.; Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, vol. i: History and Environment (L., 1988), 309 ff. This controverted question is ably reviewed by Sahlins, ‘Natural Frontiers Revisited’. 20 OL, A 115, cs. 2, esp. B 1, B 3 (with a bitter dispute c. 1790 between the citizens of Hainburg and De´veńy, on either side of the Danube above Pressburg/Pozsony), B 4; cs. 6, fos.132 ff., for a man-made (?) change in the river line; cf. also ibid. fols. 182 ff. For the pros and cons of river boundaries in France, cf. Sahlins, ‘Natural Frontiers Revisited’, 1440, 1442.


123

than about ours. This ignorance of our own lands and lack of detailed military maps have caused enormous trouble, disadvantage, and difficulty.21

It is no accident either that in the Habsburg dominions and elsewhere the resulting highly professional surveys (for the Monarchy a complete triangulation on 5,400 sheets during the next twenty-five years) should be treated as state secrets. Now it may be hard from some perspectives to grasp the radical nature of this supersession of old assumptions. After all, in the New World, in the very same years, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon were measuring out their famous line of latitude (precisely 39 43 0 26.300 north) to separate Maryland from Pennsylvania. But American borders were—or at least the white man felt them to be— essentially demarcations of the waste. In Europe the same approach represented surgery performed on the living body of society. Only gradually could even rulers, let alone the ruled, contemplate such a thing. Let me suggest the stages by which that rethinking of the concept of the frontier may have come about in Central Europe.

It began in the east, where historic boundaries had been slowest to congeal. Hardly was the medieval pattern of settlement and lordship complete than Turkish inroads began to upset it. The Ottomans showed themselves largely (albeit not wholly) dismissive of the established borders they overran, as Christian powers usually were not; whereas from the fifteenth to the later seventeenth century chronic spasmodic warfare in the Danubian basin allowed only a transient, fluctuating, de facto inter-state frontier to subsist there. But that is not the main point: the Christian response was long to pretend that the whole Islamic irruption formed anyway only a temporary episode (much of the cartography of contemporary Hungary simply ignored it). Only in the 1680s and 1690s did a decline in Ottoman power permit the Habsburgs to take the initiative; only in 1699 did a firm frontier settlement emerge by negotiation—and perforce it was a largely artificial one, over terrain ravaged by recent depredations and by centuries of neglect, where strategic considerations played the paramount role. The Treaty of Carlowitz enshrined a two-year survey by the Austrian general Marsigli, as registered in minutest detail by the thirty-nine sections of J. C. Mu¨ller’s Mappa geographico-limitanea in qua Imperiorum Caesarei et Ottomanici confinia in almae pacis Carlovitzensis congressu decreta [sunt].22 This outcome involved not merely an artificial division on the map; a broad new frontier swathe was created on the ground, and adapted to military Papp-Va´ry and Hrenko´, Magyarorsza´g, 20 f. See the documents in Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, Relazioni dei confini della Croazia e della Transilvania a sua Maesta` Cesarea, 1699–1701, ed. R. Gherardi (2 vols., Modena, 1986); cf. Gherardi, Potere e costituzione, 315 ff. and passim; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 164–215. Mu¨ller’s map is cited in Lexikon zur Geschichte der Kartographie, ed. Kretschmer, i. 276, as an outstanding example of the Grenzkarte. 21 22

124

The Rise of Nations

requirements. The entire area along and behind the inter-state demarcation on the Austrian side became an official Milita¨rgrenze, directly subordinated to the needs of the army and ignoring the social and administrative structure of the customary manorial system; and it really meant business, enforcing strict quarantine for travellers from Turkey (ten days, or twenty in time of epidemic). Here was the most formidable frontier which Central Europe had probably ever seen, at least since the days of the Romans; and one organized on novel principles, with strong metropolitan control. It did not quite act as a hermetic seal (locals could slip through, as the young Croatian patriot Tkalac once did, for example, simply in order to visit Bosnia); but most of the arrangements endured, with further modifications, until the 1870s.23 Elsewhere, too, the root-and-branch mentality of those charged with managing the reconquered territories (the Neo-Acquistica) challenged head-on the native Hungarian respect for ancestral borders—a respect only enhanced to atavistic proportions by first Turkish and now Austrian attempts to extinguish them. The historic frontier, like the whole venerable Hungarian constitution, fought back. But it had to make concessions: when the Banat of Temesva´r was restored to civil authority in 1780, even traditionalists had forgotten the whereabouts of its ancient county divisions and had to settle for artificial ones.24 By that time the historic frontier had come under assault elsewhere as well, from rulers seeking administrative convenience and military advantage. The campaign was begun by Frederick II of Prussia, whose seizure of most of Silesia in 1740, as it forsook the policies of marriage and inheritance adopted by his predecessors to extend the bounds of their country, correspondingly breached customary methods in the way the new frontier with Austria was determined. Largely artificial, though not entirely so—in that it followed some existing borders in the congeries of Silesian duchies (and ironically left with Austria the only ones to which the Prussian Hohenzollerns had possessed some shadowy claim)—the settlement of 1742, confirmed in 1745 and 1748 after further fighting, created a new yardstick for the treatment of international boundary disputes.25 The Habsburg response to the Prussian challenge was a political reorganization under Maria Theresa which did some violence to historic 23 See, in general, Gunther Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana, Ill., 1960); id., The Military Border in Croatia, 1740–1881 (Chicago, 1966); Die k.k. Milita¨rgrenze: Beitra¨ge zu ihrer Geschichte (V., 1973); and most recently Karl Kaser, Freier Bauer und Soldat: Die Militarisierung der agrarischen Gesellschaft an der kroatisch-slawonischen Milita¨rgrenze, 1535–1881 (V., 1997), esp. 346–52, 643–51, for the imposition of a full army regime. I. I. Tkalac, Uspomene iz Hrvatske, ed. S. Dvorsak (Zagreb, 1945), 112 ff. 24 Jeno ˝ Szentkla´ray, Gro´f Niczky Kristo´f életrajza (Pozsony/Bp., 1885), 27; Domokos Kosa´ry, Ujja´épı´te´s és polga´rosoda´s, 1711–1867 (Bp., 1990), 35. 25 By the preliminary terms agreed at Breslau (11 June 1742), confirmed as the peace of Berlin (28 July 1742), Austria retained, in the whole of Silesia, only the duchies of Teschen and Troppau entire, plus parts of Ja¨gerndorf and Neisse: Bein, Schlesien in der habsburgischen Politik, 240–55; cf. K. von Spruner and T. Menke (comp.), Hand-Atlas (3rd edn., Gotha, 1880), maps 45, 46; G. Ko¨bler (comp.), Historisches Lexikon der deutschen La¨nder (Mun., 1988), s.vv.


125

divisions: a new layer of internal administration in the Austrian half of the Monarchy (the system of Kreise) modified some borders on the ground and altered their significance; even centuries-old diocesan and parish boundaries came under attack. Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II, undertook during the 1780s a much more thorough demolition of the local-government structure in Hungary: not so much the notorious new districts, amalgamations of several historic counties—whose ancient borders thus survived, albeit shorn of their former importance; rather the call for the subdivisions of counties (the ja´ra´sok, or equivalents of Kreise) to be completely redrawn according to geographical and demographic convenience.26 This, and the still more revolutionary border changes within neighbouring Transylvania, were all lost with Joseph’s death amid massive discontent in 1790. In the north-east of the region, however, Joseph and Frederick cooperated— alongside Catherine II of Russia—to upset the frontier status quo with devastating effectiveness. The Partitions of Poland, designed first to truncate, and then to eliminate that ancient Commonwealth without remainder and without visible remembrance, deliberately established new borders instead of following the lines of existing provinces (wojewo´dztwa). The result, at first, was chaos. The irascible Joseph fulminated from Vienna in 1773 to his brother: I don’t believe that even among the Iroquois and the Hottentots such ridiculous things occur . . . as here, and especially in the famous departments and in the Staatskanzlei of Prince Kaunitz. You could write comedies about it which would seem incredible to anyone who did not know the facts and to posterity. Suppose I were to tell you that they don’t even know the names of the rivers; that until I myself had told them and made them see it, they thought that the Bug flowed into the Dniester and not into the Vistula; finally that they thought an area 20 leagues by 5 a trifle because it looked so small on a general map. But I’ll stop, for I may say that my heart bleeds to see the fatherland in such hands.27

Actually, Joseph was as confused as his ministers about the Bug, not realizing that there are two of them. In another case, the further inadequacies of rivers even as artifical frontiers stand revealed: the one identified by the Austro-Polish treaty, the Podorze, proved to be non-existent, except on Austrian maps; and the Habsburg authorities subsequently, it seems, fined anyone who, by continuing to call it by its proper name of Zbrucz, appeared to cast doubt on the imperial claim to its western bank.28 These concerns were now dramatically overtaken by yet more significant developments in the west. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic era 26 Dickson, Finance and Government, i. 276 ff.; S ˇkolnı´ atlas ˇceskoslovenskyćh deˇjin, ed. I. Benesˇ 27 Beales, Joseph II, 216. (Pr., 1964), 22. Hajdu, II. Jo´zsef igazgata´si reformjai (Bp., 1982). 28 Ibid. 302, for Joseph’s view of this intricate matter; Encyklopedyja powszechna, vol. xii (Warsaw, 1884), 331. Subsequent non-Austrian maps appear to have regarded the two river names as synonyms (the Bol’shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya, vol. ix [3rd edn., Moscow, 1972], 405, still has Zbrucz and ‘Podgorec’ as equivalents). I am not clear about the pre-1772 nomenclature.

126

The Rise of Nations

possess an obvious epoch-making importance for our theme. Above all they entailed, on the one hand, a complete reorganization of France’s domestic boundaries on rational lines: the de´partements introduced in 1790 were roughly equal in area and represented an emphatic denial of historical continuity, not least in the river or mountain names adopted by most of them. On the other hand, the Revolution and Empire brought a complete reorganization of France’s external boundaries on military lines, with the consequent transformation of those in Central Europe too: the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire and all the associated transfers of land. More than 350 territories were reduced to fewer than forty, with a bewildering number of intermediate changes along the way, a process essentially confirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, despite Napoleon’s eventual downfall. Yet all this proved not quite so decisive as might appear. First, the debate over French local government did in fact allow considerable scope to arguments from history, and its outcome by no means entirely disarmed local and regional lobbies. Secondly, the map of Germany, albeit redrawn more radically than at any time over the previous thousand years, still retained—as had earlier piecemeal settlements—most of its traditional lesser boundaries, as well as some of the greater ones: its watchword was consolidation rather than division.29 Besides, thirdly, the ideology of change itself generated a counter-ideology of conservation. The age of Romanticism around 1815 for the first time created conscious justifications for the historicity of frontiers, as of other inherited values and institutions. The stage was thus set for the well-balanced mid-nineteenth-century struggle between political modernity and political tradition in Central Europe. Its most crucial phase began in the revolutionary year 1848, which brought the abolition of ‘feudalism’—the system of Herrschaft—in the Habsburg lands, with incalculable consequences for local mentalities, and led to a major revision of internal borders by the neo-absolutist Austrian regime of the 1850s.30 Over the region as a whole existing arrangements largely survived, for the present. But the issue of frontiers was shown to be drawn ineluctably into an even more fundamental contest.

29 M.-V.Ozouf-Marignier, La Formation des de ´partements: la repre´sentation du territoire français a` la fin du 18e sie`cle (Paris, 1989). The territorial provisions of the Vienna Settlement are to be found in E. J. Hertslet (comp.), The Map of Europe by Treaty . . . since the General Peace of 1814 (4 vols., L., 1875–91), i. 208–77. While they provide for the application, in a few cases, of one markedly ‘artificial’, not to say cynical, even Gogolesque principle—the transfer of autochthonous populations on the basis of a mere head-count (thus Saxe-Weimar was to receive a total of 50,000 inhabitants from Prussia, the new boundary to be determined accordingly)—the overall impression is of respect for the status quo at the local level. 30 Carl von Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 1848–58 (Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1858), 35 ff. and passim; Josef Redlich, Das o¨sterreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem (2 vols., Leipzig, 1920–6), i. pt.1, 416 ff. Cf. the section on local government in Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, vol. ii: Verwaltung und Rechtswesen, ed. A. Wandruszka and P. Urbanitsch (V., 1975), 195 ff. (by E. Hellbling), which, however, ignores the question of boundaries.


127

The ‘springtime of nations’ in 1848 marked a sudden maturing of the ethnic criterion for nationhood, and with it the sternest of challenges to the historic political ordering of Central Europe. A complex amalgam of influences from the Enlightenment and Romanticism—concern for the improvement of the common people, enthusiasm for vernacular languages, revolt against the authoritarian state, the cult of the organic community—yielded attachment to a new species of nation: not a geographical and objective, but a cultural and subjective identity. This was a category almost wholly unregarded earlier by governments. Neither Frederick II nor Joseph II took any notice of ethnic affiliation; at most it featured in a shadowy way as a facet of the distinct legal status enjoyed by, or imposed upon, certain religious groups, like the Protestants and Orthodox in Hungary or the Jews over most of the area. No proper statistics or maps recorded it before the beginning of the nineteenth century. Now ethnicity, ‘natural’ perhaps in cultural terms, was thoroughly ‘artificial’ with respect to existing boundaries. Its prime badge in Central Europe, the spoken language, had never formed more than a very minor item in the constitution of historic frontiers, which at most marked out only small dialectal differences at the micro-level. Its growing significance henceforth posed two critical questions. First, could an ethnic line be drawn at all? Hardly a precise one: there would be a reversion to the swathes or no man’s lands of yore in areas where tongues merged into one another; elsewhere any adjudication must perforce yield enclaves, especially of town dwellers, or face an inextricable pot-pourri, as in the Banat. But some kind of rough demarcation between German and Slav or Magyar and Slav might serve as a challenge to established borders. Yet who, secondly, really wanted an ethnic line? Nineteenth-century nationalism in the region drew only part of its self-definition from present linguistic identity; the rest came from a historical perception of the national community as being sustained within permanent and given frontiers. In other words, it sought to capture an existing geopolitical entity, state or province, for its own purposes. Let us consider, in all brevity, the three main examples in our area of interaction between ethnic nationalism and the frontier. Magyar nationalism furnishes the clearest example of a movement which maintained a total political and emotional commitment to the historic borders of the Hungarian state with which it identified itself. Fortified by the supposed and—on the whole—genuine antiquity of those borders, Magyars made light of the fact that by the nineteenth century they had become a minority people within them, just 45 per cent or so of the population. Through more or less intolerant policies at the expense of other ethnic groups, they sought to make Magyardom coterminous with the bounds of the country which they dominated politically and culturally. They aimed, in other words, to extend the ethnic frontier until it met the territorial one.31 31 For a serious and accessible contemporary statement of this position, by a highly pro-Magyar English aristocrat, see C. M. Knatchbull-Hugesson, The Political Evolution of the Hungarian Nation (2 vols., L., 1908). I have summarized the issues in The Historian, 77 (2003), 6–12.

128

The Rise of Nations

With the Slavs things were different. In certain cases, indeed, the leaders of Slavonic peoples might make an important appeal of the same kind to historic borders: Czechs claimed their so-called ‘state rights’ as the majority population within old Bohemia; Poles looked back to the bounds—less firmly determined— of their now extinguished Commonwealth; Croats argued for the territory of a kingdom hopelessly obscured by centuries of migration and resettlement since Ottoman onslaughts. Yet the strength of the Slav case lay in weight of numbers and in the appeal to a ‘natural’ justice which, carried to its logical end, implied artificial boundaries. Hence all those projects, from the days of Frantisˇek Palacky´ onwards, which aspired to some radical realignment of existing political realities.32 Most significant is the attitude of Germans, which blended elements both of the ‘historic’ and of the ‘artificial’ argumentation. Germany’s historic frontiers were those of the old Reich, the Holy Roman Empire ‘of the German nation’ as patriots had called it since the late Middle Ages; and it is often overlooked how much those frontiers still meant to nineteenth-century nationalists. They were, for the most part, the limits not only of the Confederation established in 1815, but of the constituencies brought into being in 1848 to elect to the single German Parliament at Frankfurt.33 Within them nationalists certainly strove, like the Magyars, to consolidate—a process for which ‘inspissation’ (Verdichtung) is probably the mot juste—at the expense of Danes, Poles, Czechs, and later of the French in Alsace-Lorraine. But they did not at first commonly look to extend those frontiers, even when autochthonous ethnic Germans lived on the other side. The degree to which that later became an ambition seems to be related to the firmness and antiquity of the border itself. In the west such a development proceeded, in some measure, with the German seizure of Lorraine—and not just of Alsace—from the French in 1871: that was, however, a long-disputed frontier, constantly shifting, and special military and emotional considerations obtained.34 There is a more instructive comparison between the north-east and the south-east bounds of the Reich. The Baltic shore in Prussia and Pomerania and the marches of Brandenburg and Silesia witnessed great waves of German colonization during the Middle Ages, and the frontier (recall how the word Grenze itself constituted a kind of conquest) continually advanced further eastwards, though without quite keeping pace—small accretions of territory took place even into the early modern period. 32 These projectors are exhaustively treated in Kann, Multinational Empire; cf. Redlich, Staatsund Reichsproblem, i, pt. 1, 271 ff. 33 F. Eyck, The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848–9 (L., 1968), 41 ff.; Harm-Hinrich Brandt, ‘The Revolution of 1848 and the Problem of Central European Nationalities’, in Nation-Building in Central Europe, ed. H. Schulze (Leamington Spa, 1988), 107–34, esp. 115 ff.; Brian E. Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Camb., Mass., 2002), 139–73. 34 For the details: Hertslet (comp.), Map of Europe, iii. 1912–17, 1954–62. For the background: cf. Ko¨bler (comp.), Historisches Lexikon, s.v. ‘Elsaß’, ‘Elsaß-Lothringen’, ‘Lothringen’.


129

Then Polish power began to ebb, which led to that radical reconstitution of borders through Partition which we have already encountered. Little wonder if the Vaterland of ever more fervent nationalists was increasingly deemed to stretch further, to embrace not only Prussian domains beyond the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire, but other territories besides. The seed was sown for Nazi Lebensraum ideology and the total destruction of Polish statehood in 1939. Further south matters took a very different course. The frontier from Teschen to the Adriatic, dividing imperial terrain—Moravia, Austria, Styria, Carniola— from the lands of the Hungarian crown, was perhaps the firmest in all Central Europe: established by the year 1100, it remained in place eight centuries later. And Germans respected it, even though the borderlands on the Hungarian side were inhabited by people of their own ethnicity (Franz Liszt, to name but one). German and Austrian liberals of 1848, like most Habsburg emperors before and after them, recognized that demarcation: indeed, the diminutive river Leitha, which formed part of the frontier, even came to give its name to the two halves of the Dual Monarchy. But they did so not out of any admiration for the Magyars and their country. ‘Enlightened Europe ends at the confines of Hungary’, wrote a Russian traveller returning home in 1810, and his sentiment was soon to be perpetuated in Metternich’s famous jibe that ‘Asia’ began at the Landstrasse running out of Vienna towards Hungary. Rather the perception of the frontier itself, as a political and cultural divide, helped to determine the attitudes of peoples on either side of it.35 Of course, the emergence of a new kind of perceived ethnographic frontier proved highly important for the whole construction of nineteenth-century nationalism. A well-attested leading role was played in national movements by ‘frontiersmen’ in that sense: those who came from the margins of a given culture, where it abutted on, or overlapped with, other cultures, and whose identification with it took on the character of personal conversion (or apostasy!), as with Lelewel and Mickiewicz among the Poles, Szećhenyi and Kossuth among the Magyars, or Gaj and Strossmayer among the Croats. Yet, on the whole, conventional political borders continued to dominate the debate, and the struggle was still fought essentially at a local level. After 1850, with the elimination of Herrschaft, the basic administrative unit over the whole region became the commune. That might be a distinction without a difference: most village boundaries remained the same, and old attitudes in the countryside died hard.36 35 Quotation from V. B. Bronevskii, Puteshestvie ot Triesta do S-Peterburga v 1810 godu (2 vols., Moscow, 1828), 54 ff. We may also detect the influence here of Droysen’s 1833 biography of Alexander the Great, in which ‘Greece’ was widely assumed to stand for Germany (including Austria) and ‘Asia’ for the more primitive parts of [eastern] Europe: cf. Hagen Schulze, Is There a German History? (L., 1988), 15 f. For ‘Cisleithania’ etc., cf. below, p. 246 and passim. 36 This is not to deny the genuinely democratic initiatives in communal administration: see Heinrich Heffter, Die deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert: Geschichte der Ideen und ¨ sterreich, 1848– Institutionen (Stuttgart, 1950); Jirˇ´ı Klabouch, Die Gemeindeselbstverwaltung in O 1918 (V., 1968).

130

The Rise of Nations

At all events, the main contest occurred on the intermediate plane, in the district or the county; and here too well-established borders continued to command much support. In this respect the unification of Germany made little real difference to frontiers there, apart from some realignment in territories actually conquered by Prussia in 1866. The federal nature of the Second Reich and the strength of regional or provincial sentiment within it are commonplaces of recent scholarship.37 Tiny entities survived as full member states of the Empire (the eight Thuringian duchies, all divided into several pieces, until 1920); so did many other historic configurations as districts with unchanged borders. In Austria the ‘crownlands’ (Kronla¨nder), large and small, resisted almost all attempts at a more logical or practical ordering. In Hungary a modernizing regime after 1867 at last grasped the nettle of county reform: it eliminated the archaic separate jurisdiction for sixteen towns (in five distinct enclaves) of the Zips, as well as other anomalies, like Felso˝ Fehe´r, with its minuscule and unconnected parcels of land in Transylvania. But most Hungarian counties, with their boundaries and names commemorating many long-lost fortresses of the early Magyars, survived intact.38 The reason for their survival was not, of course, merely conservative sentiment. Calculation of political and national advantage played its part. The refusal to adapt county boundaries in Hungary frustrated the desire of Slav and Rumanian minorities to achieve a division of the country on ethnic lines; though non-Magyar leaders likewise sought, in the first instance, to take over existing historic entities rather than construct new artificial ones. We encounter a fascinating interplay in this connection within Bohemia, scene of the Habsburg Monarchy’s worst nationality friction in the later nineteenth century. There a reorganization of local borders into new districts (Bezirke) did take place from the 1850s. The Czechs were first to conceive of a bipartition of the country along the linguistic frontier, albeit only when they despaired of any remedy for their national grievance under the current territorial arrangements. Later the Germans, afraid of Czech migration into their Bezirke, accepted the principle; but by that time the Czechs, confident of their growing political power, had reverted to the demand for retention of both the Bohemian state and its Bezirke undivided. How different the future of the Habsburg Empire 37 For the administrative issues, see Heffter, Selbstverwaltung; G.-C. von Unruh, Der Kreis (Cologne/Berlin, 1965). For identity issues: Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990); Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wu¨rttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); Abigail Green, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Camb., 2001). But cf. below, p. 279. 38 Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, ii. 409 ff. (by George Barany); Andor Csizmadia, A magyar ko¨zigazgata´s fejlo˝de´se a XVIII. sza´zadto´l a tanaćsrendszer le´trejo¨tteíg (Bp., 1976), 145–60. The Zips towns, encountered earlier, had by now swollen in number by the addition of Gnezda, Lublo´, and Podolıń, whose administration had previously been different again.


131

might have been if a resolution of such domestic frontier questions could have been implemented.39

At most, then, nineteenth-century governments contemplated modest internal adaptations to the network of traditional frontiers across the face of Central Europe. The twentieth century has seen massive international transformations, the coming of the artificial frontier with a vengeance: a redrawing not only of inter-state boundaries, but of borders at the micro-level too, in a way not experienced since the Vo¨lkerwanderung. Closely associated with this, indeed its prime justification, has been the triumph of the ethnic principle, the rationale of the ‘nation-state’, whereby the cultural and linguistic nation is conceived as an immutable, complete, and self-determining entity, and the limits of the state are drawn to accommodate it. Such was the justification offered for the first great assault on historic frontiers after the First World War, above all by the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, which carved up old Hungary and assigned parts of it to six successor states, besides the eponymous rump kingdom. The same treatment was meted out along parts of the German and Austrian borders, where plebiscites were held in certain areas in an effort to ascertain the exact wishes of the inhabitants. The process was renewed at the end of the Second World War in the north of the region, with the celebrated artificial demarcations assigned to the Polish state in its second reincarnation: the Oder-Neisse line to the west, and the ‘Curzon line’ (or something akin to it) in the east.40 Two concluding comments need to be made from our perspective upon these momentous developments. The first is that, whereas national selfdetermination may have represented the latter-day equivalent of that drive for rational ordering and disdain for tradition which since the time of the Enlightenment had constituted one element in the rise of the artificial frontier, the other element, strategic considerations, likewise played its part in constructing the map of the new Central Europe. In fact, fresh borders hardly ever followed a pure ethnic line, even where that could have been implemented. Everywhere they were adapted to a greater or lesser extent to the dictates of security, communications, and economic organization, leaving aggrieved minorities on either side. 39 See, for the crucial abortive negotiations of 1890, from the Czech side, Denis, C ˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ii. pt. 3, 232 ff., and Bruce M. Garver, The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System (New Haven, 1978), 146 ff.; and from the German, Ernst v. Plener, Erinnerungen (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1911–21), ii. 382 ff., and Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, 1996), 240 ff. 40 The ‘Curzon line’ was the demarcation arbitrated by the Allies in late 1919 according to a rough ethnic yardstick but not then implemented; it accords fairly closely both with the border between German and Soviet spheres of influence agreed under the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact of 1938 and with that between Poland and the Soviet Union imposed by the latter in 1945.

132

The Rise of Nations

The second point is that the historic boundary was by no means fully superseded, even in the act of transfer of authority. Sometimes the terms of the settlement itself had to respect it, as with the plebiscite, which after all, solvent as it might be of the status quo between states, presupposed some existing defined political unit in the locality within which a majority for one or the other allegiance could be established. In fact it could be argued that the collapse of the Central- and Eastern-European empires in 1918 actually represented, in the first instance, their dissolution into historic component parts; it exacerbated longstanding disputes at the provincial or communal level, struggles for control in county or province—at least until foreign influences were brought to bear. Many people still assume that the new frontiers of Versailles and the other Paris treaties were imposed on the region by the Great Powers; others retort that they reflected a pattern of control already established by the new ruling interests, i.e. the national party blocs, within the region. The truth is surely that the latter determined the general shape of the post-war settlement; but they still tended to envisage solutions in terms of existing geopolitical entities. What the Allies supplied was only the icing on the cake: the theory of ethnic self-determination and the practice of the artificial frontier as a deus ex machina, a convenient way of cutting gordian knots. Outsiders could draw the detail of new boundaries without inhibition or any sense of loss. For those near at hand things may have changed less than foreigners imagined. There is the well-known story of the western visitor who asked an elderly citizen of Mukacˇevo in Ruthenia (or some other such location) about his career. Born in Hungary, was the reply; then apprenticed in Czechoslovakia; saw war-service in Hungary; married in the Soviet Union; now retired in the Ukraine. ‘You’re a much-travelled man’, observes the stranger. ‘No, I’ve lived in this house all my life.’ After 1918 new power groups in the area strove to put their own house and gardens in order, mending their old-established fences and tilling the soil which these enclosed. Most particularly was that so of the Czechs within Bohemia, which became the western half of Czechoslovakia almost unchanged: only after 1945 did the frontiers of Bohemia mark an ethnic divide, and that was by virtue not of shifting them, but of expelling the native German minority. The process of adjusting the limits of the nation to fit those of the state, begun—as we saw—well before the age of nationalism, has continued in full swing in the twentieth century, the creation of an Austrian identity for the rump Republic being a good example. And now both frontiers and populations could suddenly be moved in tandem, as in the case of Poland after 1945, when the new territories west to the Oder–Neisse line had to be settled by immigrants from lands lost to Russia in the east. Meanwhile, of course, perceptions of the frontier itself have much changed. The consecrated cumuli of yore gave way to passport controls, often to barbed-wire barriers, then in our own day to a process of spiritualization which is still in train. Along with the rise and decline of the border as a physical barrier has gone a reduced sense of its historical permanence, or of that coincidence


133

between lesser and greater boundaries upon which the older political structures of Central Europe had been built. Consider the striking example of the Iron Curtain, probably the most complete barrier ever fabricated in the region: not, in fact, an entirely artificial frontier for the most part, since it followed the line of German provinces, then of Bohemia, even for a short distance that of the Holy Roman Empire. But it was certainly felt to be adventitious, and at length revealed itself to have had footings of clay. Its collapse returned a still federal Germany much more to her historic bounds. It is a moot point how much the disregard for ancient frontiers involved in constructing the other new states of Central Europe contributed on its own to their domestic problems, as if the ghost of the god Terminus were still abroad. Four of them—Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia—all straddled the border of the old Empire; and the latter two have now fractured on just that line. Altogether it probably remains true that regions where modern jurisdictions coincide with ancient ones possess more inherent stability than those where they do not, and that regions seeking national legitimacy will tend to identify ethnic with geopolitical frontiers, preferably time-honoured ones. In Oxford, the place of this writing, in the twenty-first century, choirboys on Ascension Day still walk the streets in scarlet robes, passing through doorways and gates, even crossing the middle of colleges, pausing from time to time to strike the walls with long wands and to utter uncouth shouts: they literally beat the bounds of an ancient city parish, to the mild amusement of the citizenry and the considerable puzzlement of tourists.41 From that kind of anachronistic survival to the frontier commissions or customs agencies, not to say the national self-perception of the modern state is a long road, but—I would submit— a direct one.

41 A description in Robert R. Martin, Beating the Bounds of the Parish of St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford (Ox., 1961).

8 Joseph II and Nationality in the Habsburg Lands The decade of Joseph II’s direct rule over Habsburg Central Europe in the 1780s brought the first of two attempts—equally remarkable, equally abortive (and for the second, see below, chapter 15)—at uniform and absolute central control of the whole region. As is well known, this helped generate, or catalyse, forces of opposition which would (re)assert regional and provincial autonomies on an increasingly national(ist) basis. Yet it has often been overlooked that Josephinism also interacted positively with the intensifying sense of local and ethnic identity, and that some of the most devoted supporters of the revolutionary Emperor were also early leaders of movements committed to the propagation of national cultures. This essay provides an outline survey of these interactions and of their implications for the future

To examine the relation between the mighty programme of eighteenth-century Austrian state building and reform which culminated in the rule of Joseph II during the 1780s, and the origins of that dominant nineteenth-century issue which ultimately destroyed the Habsburg Monarchy, might seem an obvious and by now otiose duty. There is a huge literature, much of it recent and perceptive, on both Josephinism and nationality. Yet with the squarely metropolitan focus of the former, and the disparate, centrifugal treatments of the latter, the two sets of problems have—as was already hinted in an earlier chapter—remained largely unrelated to each other. I cannot evidently begin to do justice to their juxtaposition now: instead I offer a rough charting of the terrain, a kind of preliminary land survey, whose fate (like that of Joseph’s, fiercely opposed by the nobility) may be instant combustion. Of course, for Josephinism’s chief protagonist my subject would have been a non-subject. Nationality was one thing the Emperor did not try to embrace in his statistical investigations.1 He recognized only the demands of creating a modern, centralized society, towards which he expected all right-thinking citizens to display an equal commitment, but which raised opposition from (as Originally printed in Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. H. M. Scott (London: Macmillan, 1990), 209–19, 331–2, 361–6. 1 Guszta ´v Thirring, Magyarorsza´g ne´pesse´ge II. Jo´zsef kora´ban (Bp., 1938), 3–12, for the principles behind his great census of 1784–7.

Joseph II and Nationality

135

he saw it) traditional sectional habits and loyalties, among them those of province or region. Historians have tended to turn these assumptions on their head. The outcome of Joseph’s policies, they have been inclined to argue, was on the one hand broad socio-economic changes, better education, more mobile and advanced populations ripe for coherence and integration, but on a national rather than a dynastic base; while on the other hand the very pressure for uniformity generated, in the realm of ideas, precisely those resentments which would be articulated in the guise of nationalism. There is much evidence to support a story of action and reaction. The general decision to impose German as language of administration and schooling was notoriously ill-fated; while particular ordinances, like the insistence on propriety at Serbian funerals (no kissing the body of the departed, etc.) certainly raised a storm of protest which could be channelled by leaders of the ethnic community.2 Yet that is not the whole story. Josephinism and national consciousness had a common term in the Austrian Enlightenment, whose origins were older than either of theirs. This movement of Aufkla¨rung, of enlightened concern and critique in Habsburg Central Europe, dating back to the mid-century and earlier, encountered doctrinaire state building and rival national claims rather as if they formed two prismatic eye-pieces in a field-glass, ready to deflect it, but only gradually, in two opposite directions. Josephinism captured the ideas somewhat earlier; nationality somewhat later. And the consequent parting of the ways can be located fairly precisely in the years around 1785. It is highlighted by a series of individual rifts between the Emperor and leading officials and writers (Brukenthal, Pelcl, Rautenstrauch, Sˇkrlec, Szećheńyi, Zinzendorf . . .), who often turned away from the reality of Josephinism in proportion as they came into direct contact with the Emperor’s wishes, his brusque manner, and his lack of ‘philosophical’ commitment. But then, as scholars ever since Mitrofanov have pointed out from time to time, Joseph was not necessarily the model ‘Josephinist’.3 Until that point was reached (even a little afterwards) the opportunity existed for a genuine interplay. The Aufkla¨rung, so the poet Blumauer quaintly put it in 1782, at the height of its influence in Austria, ‘proceeds by rubbing Geist against Geist, as American Indians rub stick against stick to make fire’.4 Its overwhelming 2 On the Serbian issue: Schwicker, Politische Geschichte, ch. viii and passim; Kostic ´, Grof Koler, esp. 162 ff.; Istvań Szeli, Hajnoćzy és a de´lszla´vok (Novi Sad, 1965), 54 etc. For the general impact of the language decree, see Paul [Pavel] Mitrofanov, Josef II.: Seine politische und kulturelle Ta¨tigkeit (2 vols., V., 1910), i. 252 ff., 846 ff.; and on Hungary esp. Ferenc Szila´gyi, A germaniza´la´s to¨rteńelme´bo˝1 a ke´t magyar haza´ban II. Jo´zsef alatt (Bp., 1876), and Marczali, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete II. Jo´zsef kora´ban, ii. 532 ff. 3 Mitrofanov, Josef II., i. 81 ff. and passim. For the origins of the Austrian Enlightenment, cf. above, ch.3. For its relation to official policy, see Gyula Szekfu˝ in Sz. 46 (1912), 298–307; Valjavec, Der Josephinismus, 7 and passim, where the linkage is so loose that the term ‘Josephinism’ hardly ¨ sterreich und Europa, 203–19; seems the mot juste for much of what is described; Erich Zo¨llner in O Wangermann, Aufkla¨rung und staatsbu¨rgerliche Erziehung, passim. 4 Alois Blumauer, Beobachtungen u ¨ ber Oesterreichs Aufkla¨rung und Litteratur (V., 1782).

136

The Rise of Nations

practical concern for welfare and improvement created two particular areas where statecraft and national interest might thus burn in the same flame. The first is an attention to vernacular language. Evidently the government favoured the German tongue throughout the Empire, and there were good neutral reasons for that. The spread of German to accompany the changing tastes and horizons of higher society from the 1750s into the 1780s evoked hardly any objection. Hungarian officials in the 1770s and even later positively welcomed its advance at the expense of Latin. But other vernaculars were readily drawn in pari passu at a lower level, especially for popular education and instruction. It became possible to study Czech, albeit (logically enough) more in Austria than in Bohemia (since enough people knew it there anyway): the language’s chief proponent was Count Franz Kinsky, scholar, scientist, friend of Joseph, and chief begetter of the military academy at Wiener Neustadt. Slovaks successfully lobbied for their own school at Pressburg. The Hungarian Ratio Educationis even allowed for academic dissertations to be submitted in any of the country’s languages. Hence lesser vernaculars were actually felt necessary for state purposes, and the new Normalschulen encouraged learning of them out of hours.5 Alongside this went a great increase in their use for the printed word. New journals were launched in the 1780s with government approval in Magyar, Czech, and Slovak. Nearly 400 official documents appeared in Rumanian during the same decade. The authorities promoted not just textbooks, but a flood of primers on non-curricular activities: from military matters to the prevention of fires, and above all questions of peasant tenure and husbandry.6 Let us take just one instance, since I wish to refer back to it at the end of this essay. In the early 1770s Maria Theresa summoned an illiterate Slovene bee-keeper called Jansˇa to teach his craft in Vienna. Jansˇa’s book on apiculture not only appeared in German, but it passed through five editions in Czech by the end of the century, while prominent national awakeners like the Slovak 5 Hungary: Rapant, K poc ˇiatkom mad’arizaćie, i.112 ff., passim; cf. Wolf, Schulwesen des Temesvarer Banats, 100 f., 160 f., and passim; and Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 403 ff., esp. 421–4. On the Czech case, see Kinsky, Erinnerungen, esp. paras 79–81; also Josef Hanzal in CˇsCˇH, 16 (1968), 317–39; Schamschula, Anf a¨nge, 145 ff.; Haubelt, Cˇeske´ osvıćenstvı´; Wangermann, Aufkla¨rung und ¨ sterreichische Osthefte, 38 (1996), 329–55. staatsbu¨rgerliche Erziehung, 23; Anna M. Drabek in O Some general thoughts in Valjavec, Josephinismus, 150 ff. 6 The most important such newspapers were Magyar hı ´rmondo´ (cf. the selection, ed. Gy. Ko´kay [Bp., 1981]) from 1780; V. M. Kramerius’s editorship of the Scho¨nfeldske´ cı´s. kra´l. posˇtovske´ noviny, later and better known as the Krameriusovy cı´s. kra´l. vlastenske´ noviny, from 1786; and the Presˇpurske´ noviny from 1783. The early 1790s saw Puglio’s Serbskije novini and Novakovic´’s Slaveno-Serbskija Vjedomosti, both published in Vienna. A. Ra˘dut¸iu and L. Gye´mańt (ed.), Reportoriul actelor oficiale privind Transilvania tipa˘rite ˆın limba romaˆna˘, 1701–1847 (Buch., 1981), for Rumanian documents. The popular treatises were often too ephemeral to be adequately recorded in standard bibliographies. A good example would be the much-translated works of the Austrian agriculturalist, Johann Wiegand (1707–76), especially his Handbuch fu¨r die o¨sterreichische Landjugend zum Unterricht einer wohlgeordneten Feldwirtschaft (V., 1771, etc.). Other examples in Rapant, K pocˇiatkom mad’arizaćie, i.136 ff., 304 ff., 570; Kostic´, Grof Koler, 83 ff.; Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 461 f., 571 ff., esp. 602 ff. and 637 ff.


137

Fańdly and the Rumanian Piuariu-Molna´r made the same subject available to their own people.7 Concern for vernaculars answered a deepening profession of faith among Aufkla¨rer. We can already find it with the most significant East-Central European precursors of their popular mission, the seventeenth-century Transylvanian Puritans. ‘A people which derives everything from foreign languages is most unfortunate and most worthy of sympathy among all nations. . . . I have firmly resolved that, God willing, I may before I die, communicate all knowledge to Hungarians in the Hungarian tongue.’ Thus Apaćzai in the preface to his Encyclopaedia of 1655. His appeal was at last widely echoed by 1781, when Gyo¨rgy Bessenyei (founder figure of several genres in modern Hungarian literature) could claim that ‘the basis and instrument of a country’s welfare is culture. . . . The key to culture is a national language . . . and the cultivation of that language is the first duty of the nation.’8 Such a strident call necessarily implies tensions to come. The very strength of German linguistic and literary development between the 1760s and 1780s carried other vernaculars along with it and of itself upset the neutral programme of Joseph II, which suddenly came to appear Germanizing, and to deserve resistance.9 The Emperor, for all his dealings with the Viennese court theatre, seems to have remained blissfully ignorant of that possibility. Besides, how far should popular education go? The restrictive response of many government officials was not shared by national Aufkla¨rer.10 Yet for the time being a good deal of symbiosis was achieved in the propagation of living languages. The whole process—and its implications—might perhaps be compared to the replacement of Persian in India from the 1830s, under Bentinck and Macaulay, by English at the upper level of state and judiciary, and by local tongues in lower courts. The second area of common ground is more imponderable: the whole concept of citizenship, or Staatsbu¨rgertum, and its various levels in the eighteenth-century Austrian Monarchy. The matter deserves proper semantic study. Enlightened language about the ‘common weal’ (allgemeine Glu¨ckseligkeit and Wohlfahrt, or 7 Anton Jans ˇa, Vollsta¨ndige Lehre von der Bienenzucht (V., 1775). Czech editions in Knihopis ˇceskyćh a slovenskyćh tisku˚, ed. Tobolka and Hora´k, nos. 3506–10; cf. Ottu˚v slovnı´k naucˇny´ (28 vols., Pr., 1888–1909), vi. 145 f., xxii. 477. Juraj Fańdly, Slovensky´ vcˇela´r and O uhorech aj vcˇelaćh rozmlu´vańˇı´ (both Trnava, 1802); Ioan [Piuariu-] Molna´r, Economia stupilor (V., 1785). 8 On the Puritans, cf. R. J. W. Evans in International Calvinism, 1541–1715, ed. M. Prestwich (Ox., 1985), 182 ff. Bessenyei, ‘Magyarsa´g’, in his Va´logatott mu˝vei, ed. J. Szauder (Bp., 1953). Cf. id., A holmi, ed. F. Bı´ro´ (Bp., 1983), 312 f.; and Rapant, K pocˇiatkom mad’arizaćie, i. 363 ff. 9 The German language was perceived thus by, for example, Ja ńos Batsańyi and Ferenc Kazinczy in Hungary (cf. Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 301 f.). Compare the changing perceptions of the role of the enlightened circle around K. H. Seibt in Prague, the starting point for Lemberg, Grundlagen des nationalen Erwachens. Cf. also Evans, ‘Language and State-Building’, at 7 f. 10 Examples of the narrow approach in Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresias, ix. 244; Pettenegg (ed.), Ludwig und Karl . . . von Zinzendorf, 158; Grete Klingenstein in Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, 3 (1976), 126–57, and ibid. 5 (1978), 165–204; Wangermann, Aufkla¨rung und staatsbu¨rgerliche Erziehung. We find the same opinion in an early number of the Prager Gelehrte Nachrichten, 1 (1772), no. 25, p. 87. For Joseph and the Burgtheater, cf. above, p. 63.

138

The Rise of Nations

das allgemeine Beste) allowed ambiguity, not about the general ends of public policy (since evidently the citizenry at large is meant), but about the extension of any particular community within the ‘state’. As elements of feudal privilege survived, so might elements of ethnic and cultural identity be accommodated: witness the case of Maria-Theresan Hungary earlier in this volume. Josephinism assimilated the nation to the state; but it allowed notions of patriotism, even encouraged them. The best evidence for that (as for so much else in the dynastic reform movement) is provided by Joseph von Sonnenfels. In 1771 Sonnenfels issued a brief treatise Ueber die Liebe des Vaterlandes, which begins with a lament for the demise of the virtue announced in his title. ‘To our ears the word Fatherland is a meaningless noise; but for the Romans and Greeks it rang out like the name of a loved one.’ Nowadays, he tells us, a tract on taste will be reprinted six times in a year, then again with plates and vignettes; but any discourse on patriotism will surely be shredded. Patria is the country where one lives, its laws, its form of government, its citizens. Love of it is positive attachment and pride.11 And so on. But where, concretely, was the patria of the Habsburgs’ own subjects? Sonnenfels fills his text with classical example and allusion; he mentions several other European states, China and India, Persians and Mongols, even Samojeds and Hottentots, but Austria never! An expanded version of the work as late as 1785 remained essentially the same. Even when citing—right out of the blue—the explosive slogan ‘Unity of language is unity of nationhood’, Sonnenfels could only give a facetious and uncomprehending gloss, deriving from a passage in F. M. Pelcl’s freshly published history of Bohemia.12 Pelcl was in fact one of those enlightened intellectuals, with a cast of mind not very different from Sonnenfels’s, to whom more restrictive, though overlapping interpretations of patria had begun to occur by the mid-1780s. That is evident especially in Aufkla¨rung historiography, a field which merits far more attention in this context than historians have so far accorded it. We need more work like the pioneering account of the Bohemian school, with its Czech overtones, by A. S. Myl’nikov.13 I have space here merely to indicate three aspects which illustrate the incorporation of national heritages within a wider cosmopolitan stance. One is the recovery of the Central European Renaissance, as critics of the Baroque establishment invoked older traditions to serve their purpose, among them the humanist version of patriotic values.14 Another is the vogue discipline of literary history. While De Luca’s Das gelehrte Oesterreich of 1776–8, 11 I have used the Italian translation of the first edn.: Sull’amore della patria, trans. (Baron) Antonio Zois (V., 1772), 7 ff., passim. Cf. also above, pp. 27, 62. 12 Sonnenfels, Ueber die Liebe des Vaterlandes (2nd edn., V., 1785), 189–91. Sonnenfels cites Pelcl on the Bohemian law [of 1615] which ordered fines for those not using the [Czech] Landessprache, and comments: ‘How our exchequer would profit from such a law for German nobles!’ He still sees only the threat from without, not from within the Monarchy. For Sonnenfels’ place in the contemporary German literature of patriotism, cf. Blitz, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland, 281–339. 13 Myl’nikov, Vznik na ´ rodneˇ osvıćenske´ ideologie; more generally: id., Epokha prosveshcheniya. 14 Cf. above, pp. 47f.


139

‘dedicated to the fatherland’, as its title-page announces, represents a lone attempt at a bio-bibliography of Austria, others simultaneously established the contours of a national pantheon for Bohemia (Voigt, Pelcl, Ungar . . .), Hungary (Bod, Weszpre´mi, Wallaszky, Horańyi . . .) and elsewhere.15 The third is the consciously modern discipline of statistics (in the broad contemporary sense of the term), with the semi-official local loyalties engendered in compiler and reader of such work as de Luca’s (again) for Austria, Korabinsky’s for Hungary, or the younger Riegger’s for Bohemia.16 Even the Austrian government acknowledged ‘nations’, explicitly enough, in the secondary sense of peoples. Maria Theresa recognized that usage; so sometimes did Joseph. They did so especially with reference to the Orthodox populations of southern Hungary, where the Banat actually had its Nationalisten, in the parlance of the authorities; and the subject was immediately related, through the issue of Serbian church versus Hungarian counties, to constitutional questions about the nature of citizenship.17 Thus alternative patriotic loyalties became increasingly available, and loosely conjoined with the new prominence of the vernacular issue, although a larger Austrian Landespatriotismus could subsist with them, at least until the 1790s, when the regime’s mistrust of the latter gave a clear advantage to the former. In fact the terms of the interrelationship, if not the balance within it, remained recognizably similar: from the precocious Bel in the earlier eighteenth century—a scholar significant for statistical-topographical developments, for enthusiasm about vernaculars tinged with a quasi-Puritan concern, even to a lesser extent for historical writing—who described himself as ‘by language a Slav, by nation 15 To de Luca’s incomplete work might be added the earlier sketch by F. C. von Khautz, Versuch einer Geschichte der o¨sterreichischen Gelehrten (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1755). M. A. Voigt et al. (ed.), Effigies virorum eruditorum et artificum Bohemiae et Moraviae (2 vols., Pr., 1773–4), expanded as Abbildungen bo¨hmischer und ma¨hrischer Gelehrten und Ku¨nstler (4 vols., Pr., 1773–82); F. M. Pelzl [Pelcl], Bo¨hmische, ma¨hrische und schlesische Gelehrte und Schriftsteller aus dem Orden der Jesuiten (Pr., 1786); Bohuslav Balbıń, Bohemia Docta, ed. R. Ungar (2 vols., Pr., 1776–80); R. Ungar (ed.), Allgemeine bo¨hmische Bibliothek (Pr., 1786). Pe´ter Bod, Magyar Athenas . . . (n.p., 1766); Istvań Weszpre´mi, Succincta medicorum Hungariae et Transylvaniae biographia (3 vols., Leipzig/V., 1774–87), much more than just a history of medicine; Pa´l Wallaszky, Conspectus reipublicae litterariae in Hungaria (Pressburg/Leipzig, 1785); Elek Horańyi, Memoria Hungarorum . . . scriptis editis notorum (3 vols., V./Pressburg, 1775–7), and Nova Memoria Hungarorum . . . (Pest, 1792); id., Scriptores Piarum Scholarum, with strongly Hungarian focus. 16 Ignaz de Luca, Oesterreichische Staatenkunde (2 vols., V., 1786–9), and his Geographisches Handbuch von dem o¨sterreichischen Staate (6 vols., V., 1790–2), as well as various short-lived periodicals. Johann M. Korabinsky, Geographisch-historisches und Produkten-Lexikon von Ungarn (Pressburg, 1786); cf. Jo´zsef Benko˝, Transilvania (2 vols., V., 1778), and Karl G. von Windisch, (Neues) Ungrisches Magazin (6 vols., Pressburg, 1781–91). For Riegger and his father, an important figure in the ideology of Austrian state building, see above, pp. 49 f and n. 17 Nationalisten, in administrative usage, meant especially the Serbs and Rumanians of the Banat: examples in Schwicker, Politische Geschichte, 169 f., 203, 206, 239, 377 (where ‘raizische Nationalisten’ seem to be contrasted—as by Bartenstein—with the ‘ungarische Nation’); Wolf, Schulwesen des Temesvarer Banats, passim; S. Gavrilovic´ and N. Petrovic´ (ed.), Temisˇvarski Sabor 1790 (Novi Sad, 1972) nos. 52, 176, 203, 252, 289; cf. A. Tafferner (ed.), Quellenbuch zur donauschwa¨bischen Geschichte (3 vols., Mun./Stuttgart, 1974), i, pp. xxi, 203, 249, 265.

140

The Rise of Nations

a Hungarian, by erudition a German’; to the Croatian late-Latinist Derkos in his thoughtful little treatise of 1832 on narrower and wider allegiances entitled Genius patriae super dormientibus suis filiis.18

Manifestly this kind of fruitful impact of the Josephinist state upon ethnic nations through the vernacular and through the idea of a community of Staatsbu¨rger did not operate in a vacuum. It depended on a sliding scale of responses within the given territorial, religious, and social framework, as also (perhaps) on the actual degree of contact with an impersonal and arbitrary state machine. Things worked least well with the Magyars, who afford the most obvious evidence of enlightened patriots joining conservative ones in bitter opposition to Joseph, and thereby redirecting the traditional constitution towards modern national goals. Even that was no foregone conclusion: rising forms of national sentiment did not in themselves destroy the Emperor’s position, at least until the very end (that was accomplished by other factors). He retained the support of some patriots throughout, and the language ordinances of 1784 enjoyed some success (even if their deadlines could not be kept), while the decayed state of the Magyar language was admitted by progressives to be the nation’s fault, not Joseph’s.19 Meanwhile the whole citizenship issue broadened and modified Hungarian claims, as demands for membership of the feudal nation began to give way to demands for membership of a cultural and territorial nation gaining self-consciousness precisely through awareness of an overlapping Austrian identity. Still, by the mid-1780s the fragile harmony between Josephinism and Aufkla¨rung among Magyars, even loyalist ones, had been largely vitiated. It is most instructive to observe the Protestant dimension of this (particularly since something has already been said in previous chapters about the hardly less interesting responses of westernized Catholic aristocrats, rising officials, and reforming clerics20). Joseph suffered the special historical misfortune that those most accessible to Enlightenment in Hungary, the Protestants, were already deeply alienated from any Habsburg solutions (or at least needed far more careful handling than he could muster). They exhibited some gratitude, of course, for the Patent of Toleration, which in 1781 largely removed the legal disabilities on them; they also showed a sincere commitment to the progress of popular instruction, which would lead Ferenc Kazinczy, for example, to play 18 The literature on this man variously known as Matej or Matya ´s or Matthias Bel or Be´l is correspondingly diverse: for a Slovak view see Jean [Jan] Oberucˇ, Matthieu Bel, un pie´tiste en Slovaquie au 18e sie`cle (Strasbourg, 1936); Magyar titles are in Kosa´ry, Bevezete´s, ii. 19 f. F. Fancev (ed.), Dokumenti za nasˇe podrijetlo hrvatskoga preporoda (Zagreb, 1933), 273–96 (Derkos). 19 Rapant, K poc ˇiatkom mad’arizaćie, i. 273 ff., passim; cf. ibid., 380 ff., for some comments (from Kazinczy, Ba´roćzi, etc.) about the neglect and decay of Magyar. But see also Jańos Vaćzy in Sz. 48 (1914), 257–76, 370–82, for a different perspective. 20 See above, pp. 26 ff. and ch. 3 passim.


141

a prominent role in the new educational system throughout the 1780s, Gergely Berzeviczy to join the judiciary in 1788, Sa´muel Teleki (the bibliophile) to function as district commissioner during the same years, and his nephew Jo´zsef to become a district director of schools. A Calvinist physician, Sa´muel Benko˝, devoted a whole book in 1787 to general welfare, and entitled it—with an obvious debt to Sonnenfels—Tentamen Philopatriae.21 But resentment won the day: resentment about Vienna’s economic policies; about wilful controls on freemasonic lodges; especially about interference in the ecclesiastical and educational sphere. Consider Jo´zsef Podmaniczky, one of the country’s most powerful intellects, governor of Fiume, member of Joseph’s Lieutenancy Council, posting off critical reports on government policy to his mentor Schlo¨zer at Go¨ttingen, for the edification of European opinion; or the Calvinist and Lutheran leaders of Upper Hungary, Ga´bor Prońay and Istvań Vay; or the councillors of the city of Debrecen, digging in their collective heels.22 The shrewd diarist Keresztesi, no reactionary, who actually resurrected Protestant worship in Nagyva´rad and had to appeal for Joseph to stop the local bishop from serving cheap wine in the vicinity of the large tent where he held services, still turned against the Emperor, and describes how his flock actually tore up the Toleration Patent, amid Catholic shouts of ‘vivat’.23 Among other Hungarian Protestants we encounter a similar evolution, more restrained, but in the same general direction. Germans were readiest to acknowledge a significant measure of Austrian loyalty, notably Johann Genersich, who in 1793 compiled a young person’s guide to Sonnenfelsian patriotism (and would, significantly, end his life as one of the first professors at the new Lutheran theological faculty in Vienna).24 But the Saxons of Transylvania felt mortally offended by Joseph’s high-handedness, and their leader Brukenthal, that man of high enlightened culture and western taste, earned the revealing rebuff from his ungrateful Emperor that he was ‘no Transylvanian, but 21 Kazinczy, Mu ˝vei, ed. M. Szauder (2 vols., Bp., 1979); cf. Sańdor Imre in Budapesti Szemle, 83 (1895), 161–94, 364–95; Jańos Vaćzy, Kazinczy Ferenc és kora (Bp., 1915), 152–95. Berzeviczy: Bala´zs, Berzeviczy Gergely, 135 ff. Sa´muel Teleki: Jo´zsef Keresztesi, Krońika Magyarorsza´g polga´ri és egyha´zi ko¨ze´lete´bo˝l a 18. sza´zad ve´geń (Pest, 1868),108 ff., 216 ff.; cf. above, p. 40. Jo´zsef Teleki: Csanak, Ke´t korszak hata´rań, 273 ff. On Benko˝, cf. Gyula Concha, A kilencvenes évek reformeszmeí és ko¨vetkezmeńyei (Bp., 1885), 50 ff. ´ va H. Bala´zs in Wiener Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, 3 (1976), 251–69 (Podmaniczky 22 E and Schlo¨zer); Lajos Wagner, Ba´ro´ Prońay Ga´bor Pozsony-tankeru¨leti kir. f o˝igazgato´ (Pozsony, 1912); Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 388, 393, 436, 445, 469 (Vay); and cf. Orsolya Szaka´ly, Egy va´llalkozo´ fo˝nemes, Vay Miklo´s ba´ro´, 1756–1824 (Bp., 2003); Re´ve´sz, Bećs Debrecen ellen. For mistrust about educational reform, see Eva Kowalska´, in Bohemia, 37 (1996), 23–37. 23 Keresztesi, Kro ńika, esp. 24 ff., 204 ff. 24 Genersich, Von der Liebe zum Vaterlande (2 vols., V., 1793). Moritz Csa ´ky, in Ungarn und ¨ sterreich unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II., ed. A. M. Drabek et al. (V., 1982), 71–89, and in O Wegenetz europaïschen Geistes, ed. R. G. Plaschka and K. Mack (V., 1983), argues interestingly, though perhaps a little too sanguinely, for the active survival, until 1800 and beyond, of common ground in the patriotism of Magyars and the other nationalities of Hungary. His claims for this ‘Hungarus’ ideal as a realistic alternative to rising nationalism rest heavily on the wider loyalties of Hungarian Germans.

142

The Rise of Nations

a Nationalist’.25 For their part the Slovak Lutherans clearly owed much in an indirect way to official encouragement. Pedagogues like Institoris-Mossoćzy at Pressburg, pastors like Molna´r in Pest, admired the Emperor and embraced reform, though the emotional logic of their passage to national consciousness would steer them into dangerous visionary channels, looking partly back to Hussite origins, partly forward to pan-Slav renewal.26 Much the same is true—mutatis mutandis—of communities in the GreekOrthodox tradition. To some Serbs and Rumanians Josephinism came as a patriotic release. Joseph II, our ruler beloved, The world’s sun and bestower of blessings . . . Proud Minerva, the goddess of wisdom Has enlightened thy spirit from childhood. Ah, sweet season! Ah, Golden Age among us! Among all men new affection is kindled! . . . For our nation we shall all implore Him And with tears to Him we shall petition.

That distinctive and personal statement was penned by the ex-monk Dositej Obradovic´—indeed, it introduces his remarkable autobiography, printed in 1783.27 Obradovic´, as a radical secularizer, sitting pro tem in Leipzig, could indulge his rose-coloured muse in a way that the ecclesiastical authorities at home, who had existing political claims and new grievances (recall the burial issue!) were less disposed to do. Most of his fellow-Serbs, even reformist ones, like some spokesmen at the Temesva´r congress of 1790, were harder to persuade.28 The Rumanian intellectuals of Transylvania, however, who were predominantly members of the rival Greek-Catholic, or Uniate, church and often Vienna trained, offer better material for an argument about creative linkage between Austrian state service, which provided them with jobs and a raison d’eˆtre, and their mission of popular vernacular awakening. Even if relations with the Habsburgs proved in the longer term a temporary alliance rather than a real bond of sympathy; even if the view sometimes expressed that Rumanian national sentiment was a construct of the eighteenth-century Viennese administration is 25 Schuller, Brukenthal, ii. 180 (quoted) and passim. Cf. Marko ´ , II. Jo´zsef; Go¨llner and Sta˘nescu (ed.), Aufkla¨rung, esp. 141 ff. 26 Institoris: Ja ń Caplovicˇ in J. Tibensky´ (ed.), K pocˇiatkom slovenske´ho na´rodne´ho obrodenia (Brat., 1964), 285–302. Jan Molna´r (1757–1818, not to be confused with the contemporary Magyar Jesuit and bibliographer, Jańos Molna´r) was the author of a radical Josephinist political tract: Politisch-kirchliches Manch-Hermaeon (n.p.,1790); cf. Denis Silagi, Ungarn und der geheime Mitarbeiterkreis Josephs II. (Mun., 1960), 41 ff., passim. 27 Dimitrije [Dositej] Obradovic ´, Life and Adventures, trans. and ed. G.R. Noyes (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1953), 131 ff., and introduction, passim. 28 Gavrilovic ´ and Petrovic´ (ed.), Temisˇvarski Sabor, provide full documentation for the Sabor, including plenty of Serbian grievances, mostly of the traditional kind, although it remains difficult to reconstruct the actual content of the debates or relations between the Serbian leadership and the Habsburg commissioner, Schmidfeld.


143

seriously misplaced; yet the positive Austrian stimulus to the Transylvanian School must be reckoned very considerable.29 The fullest evidence of positive associations between Josephinism and national awakening (and it should by now be apparent that I have been building up this skeletal picture in reverse order of correlation) is to be found among various Catholic Slavs of the Monarchy, alike lacking any adequate political structures into which they could pour the new commitments of enlightened intellectuals. I leave aside the Poles in newly acquired Galicia on the grounds of the special circumstances of that province (hence the Uniate Ruthenes are omitted as well) and the very different problems of statehood and nationhood raised by Austrian sovereignty there after 1772. Yet the Habsburg impact even on Galicia was substantial, and cultural linkages were by no means all negative.30 Elsewhere the scope for interplay was markedly greater. The Czech case raises complicated issues, but the deep and lasting enthusiasm of the obrozenci, or progressive patriots, for Joseph stands beyond question. At times, as in the Kniha Josefova (‘Book of Joseph’) of the publicist Kramerius, who was also the editor of the officially approved vernacular newspaper already mentioned, it turned into pure adulation.31 The ‘Private Society’ which grew up in the 1770s brought together almost all leading intellectual luminaries of Bohemia, lay and clerical. Whereas its founder (Ignaz Born) was an outsider, and royal patronage was only extended in 1790, its patriotic historical and scientific proceedings occupied exactly the common ground between Aufkla¨rung ruler and subjects: that emotional dualism which Dobrovsky´ articulated in his lecture of 1791 on the loyalty of Slavs to the house of Austria (Ueber die Anha¨nglichkeit und Ergebenheit der slawischen Vo¨lker an das Erzhaus Oesterreich); which Pelcl echoed when assuming the new chair of Czech at Prague University in 1793; and which Riegger likewise proclaimed in print the following year.32 29 Matthias Bernath, Habsburg und die Anf a ¨ nge der ruma¨nischen Nationsbildung (Leiden, 1972), is an extreme version of the manipulative view. Contrast David Prodan, Supplex Libellus Valachorum (Buch., 1971), 229 ff. and passim, and Ion Lungu, S¸coala ardeleana (Buch., 1978). The most measured outside commentator is Keith Hitchins, e.g. in his L’ideé de nation chez les roumains de Transylvanie, 1691–1849 (Buch., 1987). There was a similar impact, at a much lower level, on Hungarian Ruthenes in the age of Bishop Andrei Bachynskii; cf. Paul R. Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’ (Camb., Mass., 1978), 29 ff. 30 Horst Glassl, Das o ¨sterreichische Einrichtungswerk in Galizien, 1772–90 (Wiesbaden, 1975), 236–46 and passim, barely touches on these issues. 31 Some, e.g. Jan Strakos ˇ, Pocˇa´tky obrozenske´ho historismu v prazˇskyćh ˇcasopisech a M. A. Voigt (Pr., 1929), and Albert Prazˇa´k, Cˇeske´ obrozenı´ (Pr., 1948), esp. 9–62, have doubted the genuineness of Bohemian patriotic attachment to Habsburg-directed reform, but rather unconvincingly. Schamschula, Anf a¨nge, has curiously little to say about this Austrian dimension. The Kniha Josefova, sepsana´ od jiste´ho spatrˇujıćı´ho osmnaćte´ stoletı´, dı´lem jizˇ sta´le´ veˇci, dı´lem proroctvı´ (Pr., 1784) was adapted from a German original. It is reprinted in M. Novotny´ (ed.), Kniha Josefova [etc.] (Pr., 1941), 135–80. On the plough, cf. above, p. 93. 32 Dobrovsky ´ ’s lecture was delivered in the presence of Emperor Leopold II before the ‘Private Society’, lately renamed Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences, with some passages on the Czech language omitted; the full text was published the same year. F. M. Pelzl [Pelcl], Akademische Antrittsrede u¨ber den Nutzen und die Wichtigkeit der bo¨hmischen Sprache (Pr., 1793); Joseph

144

The Rise of Nations

The Croats were far less advanced in terms of overall cultural provision, yet they owned a roughly equal debt to Josephinism. There is arguably a direct progression from Baltazar Krcˇelic´, whom as historian we have already encountered justifying Maria Theresa’s claim on Dalmatia, and who as court prote´ge´ fought for rational centralizing administrative practice in Croatia, to his pupil, Nikola Sˇkrlec. Sˇkrlec (Skerlecz), reforming official, cameralist, head of schools and high sheriff at Zagreb, also issued the first modern defence of the Croatian tongue and worked especially for the economic development of his native regions. Thence the patriotic baton passed to his younger colleague, Maximilian Vrhovac, Joseph’s nominee as bishop of Zagreb, model of a cautiously reformist prelate, aesthete, and bibliophile, having one foot in the Enlightenment and the other in the prehistory of the Illyrian movement.33 Nevertheless both Czechs and Croats (like Serbs and Rumanians) possessed some alternative focus for such aspirations, in historic claims and vested interests. It is striking how both Pelcl and Sˇkrlec—close contemporaries—passed from admiration to condemnation of Joseph during the 1780s; while neither Dobrovsky´ nor Vrhovac—another pair of near contemporaries, born and deceased within two years of each other—felt any real spiritual sympathy for the Emperor.34 Two more minor nationalities had nowhere else to turn. In later eighteenth-century Carniola, home of the Slovenes, the largest entrepreneur was an archetypal Josephinist figure, Sigmund Zois, Freiherr von Edelstein, a rational and practical scholar with particular interests (like Born) in chemistry. One of his brothers, while studying at the Theresianum, actually translated into Italian the Sonnenfels work we have been considering, as Dell’Amore della Patria. Yet the ‘Freiherr von Edelstein’ was also Baron Zˇ iga Zois, patron and fellow-enthusiast of the first generation of admirers of the Slovene tongue, among them the Jansenist canon, Jurij Japelj, who—like Durich and Procha´zka in Bohemia— prepared a new Bible translation at the behest of the regime using sixteenthcentury Protestant models. Zois’s secretary, Kopitar, would become the founding father (along with the Dobrovsky´ of the Anha¨nglichkeit) of later Austro-Slavism.35 A. Riegger, Fu¨r Bo¨hmen von Bo¨hmen (Pr., 1794). See, in general, Jaroslav Prokesˇ, Pocˇa´tky ˇceske´ spolecˇnosti nauk do konce 18. stoletı´ (Pr., 1938), and Pavel Beˇlina et al., Velke´ deˇjiny zemı´ koruny ˇceske´, vol. x: 1740–92 (Pr./Litomysˇl, 2001), esp. 131–54, 431–9. 33 Life of Krc ˇelic´ in his Annuae 1748–67, ed. T. Smicˇiklas (2 vols., Zagreb, 1901–2), pp. i–lxvii; cf. above, p. 27. Sˇkrlec: Valdemar Lunacˇek in Historijski Zbornik, 15 (1962), 141–80; his main works have appeared in Magyar translation, ed. P. Bereńyi (Bp., 1914); his anonymous Declaratio in favour of Croat is printed in Fancev (ed.), Dokumenti, no. 8. Vrhovac: Josip Horvat, Kultura Hrvata kroz 1000 godina (2 vols., Zagreb, 1939–42), ii 149 ff., 220 ff., 225 ff. 34 F. M. Pelcl [Pelzl] (1734–1801), Pameˇti, trans. and ed. J. Pa ń (Pr., 1931), 57 ff.; for Sˇkrlec (1729–99) and Vrhovac (1752–1827), see n. 33 above. Ludvı´kovsky´, Dobrovske´ho klasicka´ humanita, is very perceptive about Dobrovsky´ (1753–1829). 35 Pogac ˇnik, Kopitar, 131 ff.; but cf. F. Kidric´ (ed.), Zoisova korespondenca, 1808–10 (2 vols., Ljubljana, 1939–41). For the Sonnenfels translation, see above, n. 11; I have not been able to discover more about this Antonio Zois, who defended theses on Polizei, Handlung, and Finanz at


145

Finally a glance at the Catholic Slovaks. In the 1760s and 1770s they threw up, in Maria Theresa’s court librarian, A. F. Kolla´r, another Krcˇelic´, an argumentative and devious mixture of central and local patriot, defending Habsburg rights in Hungary and beyond with some consciousness of Slav solidarity.36 Then in the 1780s came a squarely clerical phase, accompanying the foundation of the general seminary at Pressburg, with strong Slovak representation among both teachers and pupils, stressing the usefulness of the vernacular to priests and the need to overcome divergence of dialect. A typical progressive cleric of the day, Anton Bernola´k, led the way with a Slovak grammar, while his colleagues Bajza and Fańdly embraced other aspects of vernacular-based reform, the first with a more radical literary critique of the Hungarian church establishment, the second with a series of tracts for peasant instruction (one of them, it may be recalled, about bees).37 Altogether the Bernola´k circle furnishes the purest example of national consciousness being furthered by both the detailed measures of Joseph II and the general ethos of the Austrian reform programme. How fitting, therefore, that the finest existing work on the history of Josephinism and language should be in Slovak—and how characteristic that subsequent writers should therefore have almost totally ignored it!38

The correlation between state building and national awareness in the Habsburg lands was thus not always negative, even though—and sometimes precisely because—the impulse towards some kind of standard ‘Austrian’ identity proved so abortive. Indeed, the Aufkla¨rung’s important stimulus to linguistic claims and new forms of patriotism—especially where older forms of it were largely absent—seemed for many to be perfectly reconcilable within a Josephinist aegis. There might therefore be lessons for the interpretation of Joseph’s policies if this kind of multinational comparative enquiry were properly pursued. Their greatest affirmative effect on nationality operated through the new accents they introduced into ecclesiastical loyalties, above all Catholic ones. That would help to underline the controversial priorities (though not the narrowness of focus) inaugurated by Winter and Maass, who stressed the religious objectives of the government programme. The subsequent profitable interest in Austrian Jansenists likewise needs broadening, to recognize the existence of such as Bernola´k and Japelj, though Jansenism hardly looks a key issue on the Habsburg the Theresianum in 1772. For Austro-Slavism, see A. Moritsch (ed.), Der Austroslavismus: Ein verfru¨htes Konzept zur politischen Neugestaltung Mitteleuropas (V., 1996), and above, pp. 110 f. 36 On Kolla ´r, see above, pp. 24, 29. 37 There is much on Bernola ´k in Tibensky´ (ed.), K pocˇiatkom slovenske´ho na´rodne´ho obrodenia. For the linguistic side, see also Bernola´k, Gramaticke´ dielo, ed. J. Pavelek (Brat., 1964); Jozef Ignać Bajza, Rene´ mla´d’enca prı´hodi a skusˇenost’i, ed. J. Tibensky´ (Brat., 1955), esp. 279 ff., 330 ff.; Juraj Fańdly, Vy´ber z diela, ed. J. Tibensky´ (Brat., 1954), and cf. above, n. 7. 38 Rapant, K poc ˇiatkom mad’arizaćie. On Rapant, see now R. Marsina (ed.), Historik Daniel Rapant: zˇivot a dielo,1897–1988–1997 (Martin, 1998).

146

The Rise of Nations

periphery, and its correlation with Enlightenment was not, of course, always positive.39 There might also be lessons for the interpretation of nationality. Identifying the roots of national movements in Aufkla¨rung ideals of improvement and popular guidance helps to sustain arguments about their material circumstances, but hardly Marxist ones, since the practical policies were espoused by nationally minded intellectuals less because of existing ‘bourgeois’ development than from a desire to create it.40 A metaphor, suitably modified (and bifurcated), from the more recent history of our region may serve to illustrate the overall argument. There is a famous comment by Jo´zef Piłsudski about his role in the resurrection of Poland. Piłsudski observed that he had travelled on the Socialist tram, but only until 1918, when he got out at the station marked ‘Polish independence’.41 Joseph II, we might say, climbed aboard the tram of Aufkla¨rung, only to stop at the station marked Staatsbu¨rgertum. A little later, national communities in his Monarchy climbed aboard a Josephinist tram, only to alight at the station marked ‘nationhood’ (those having farthest to travel being most moulded by the initial impetus), and creating in the process, for the nineteenth century, an equal and opposite distortion of Enlightenment. Let us recall our simple Slovene apiarist, Jansˇa. Is there not a bee-line (as it were) from him to the age of full national organization? After all, the cultural headquarters of Austrian and Hungarian Slavs took their very name of Matica42 from the queen bee, that essential symbol of the practical groundwork of Josephinist renewal.

39 Winter, Josefinismus; Maass (ed.) Josephinismus; Hersche, Spa ¨ tjansenismus; Kovaćs (ed.), Katholische Aufkla¨rung. 40 See above, ch. 6. Cf. Myl’nikov, Vznik na ´ rodneˇ osvıćenske´ ideologie, 23 ff., and Epokha prosveshcheniya, 140 ff. Somewhat similar notions in the second edn. of Winter’s Josefinismus (Berlin, 1962), 361 and passim, and in Gogola´k, Beitra¨ge, ii. 1–10 and passim. 41 For the original comment (it may be apocryphal), see Antony Polonsky, Politics in Independent Poland, 1921–39 (Ox., 1972), 64. 42 The Matica Srpska, founded at Pest in 1826, had numerous imitators. Matica means other things too, in various Slavonic languages, but its apian significance seems central to the initiatives which took its name, especially since various nationalist periodicals also used the slogan of the worker bee (bcˇela, pcˇela, vcˇela). See also above, ch. 6, n. 16.

9 Religion and Nation in Hungary, 1790–1849 Hungary had the most diverse confessional and ethnic composition of any state in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Since from the years around 1790 onwards it became increasingly vulnerable to national conflict, which culminated in a brutal civil war in 1848–9, it is natural to enquire how far such strife was engendered by religious factors. This essay examines the relation between the churches and national politics during that period. It argues that confessional rivalries within ethnic communities, and a tendency towards secularization of public life, increasingly militated against the direct political influence of religion. Even in the case of the Orthodox Rumanians and Serbs, the church came to exercise a largely oblique impact. The forms of organization and engagement which religious-based communities bequeathed to the modern world became filled with ever more overtly national content, but a content which still bore a deep imprint of pre-modern confessional commitment. In this respect the Hungarian experience may seem to anticipate that of Balkan peoples subsequently.

Early 1849, in the Banat of Temesva´r: ‘Old men, children and women have been most brutishly murdered by the Christian barbarians; churches and holy altars besmirched and desecrated in the most horrifying fashion; the dead dug out from their graves, their corpses and putrefied bones dismembered, tossed into wells, or thrown as food for dogs and birds. . . . No human pen is capable of adequately depicting the agony which the Serbian people has suffered . . . [the Magyars—the indictment continues—are worse than] redskins in the deserts of America . . . beelzebubs, the like of which hell itself could not beget.’ This is the Serbian leader speaking, Metropolitan (and purported Patriarch) Rajacˇic´, who a few months earlier had written to the imperial general Jellacˇic´, the coordinator of South-Slav support for the beleaguered Habsburgs, with the following challenge: ‘My priestly conscience compels me to declare to Your Excellency that if you do not, on receipt of this letter, launch an offensive against the Magyars at once,

Originally published as ‘Religion und Nation in Ungarn, 1790–1849’, in Siebenbu¨rgen in der Habsburgermonarchie, vom Leopoldinum bis zum Ausgleich, ed. Zs. K. Lengyel and U. A. Wien (Cologne, 1998), 13–45.

148

The Rise of Nations

I shall have no choice but to assume that our whole alliance has been repudiated by the Croatian side.’1 Since the start of the troubles in March 1848 Rajacˇic´ had been commander of the insurgent Serbs. In mid-May he had summoned to Sremski Karlovci a ‘sabor’ or national congress, where it was decided to establish an autonomous Serbian territory, which could be defended with armed force against the Hungarian state. At the same time Rumanian Uniate and Orthodox prelates in Transylvania held a similar assembly: this proceeded in the likewise small episcopal town of Blaj, to the tolling of bells and in the presence of local clergy from all the villages of the area as well as of many protopopes, who stood out with their combed hair and trimmed full beard, their soutane, red belt and tassled hat. The main address, a fiery but long-winded arraignment of the Magyars by the priest Simeon Ba˘rnut¸iu, was—according to the report—received in ‘a religious silence’ (o ta˘cere religioa˘sa).2 In the further course of the conflict, once the assembly’s petition had been ignored by the regime, a long series of atrocities were perpetrated by both sides. At the time of the revolutionary events of 1848–9 in Hungary, churches thus emerged as active representatives of national communities in a veritable civil war. But only in the south of the country and Transylvania, and only in the struggle between the Magyars and the population which adhered to the Greek rite. This state of affairs seems clearly to foreshadow later developments in the Balkans. In what follows I shall seek to extract from the vast materials on the relation between religion and nation in earlier nineteenth-century Hungary specifically some of those which might seem to illustrate the advent of extreme forms of action. Are we dealing here with societies which were only—or somehow essentially—divided by ecclesiastical allegiance? Or rather with a clash of radically divergent styles of life, which simply found expression in the religious sphere? There is a wider context that I can only hint at here. From the 1790s we encounter the beginnings of ‘modern’ wars of religion in Europe: Chouans, Vendeéns, Sanfedisti and their successors went on the attack against the new irreligion, and unleashed waves of mutual bestiality.3 How far could such battles over secularization also be fought within and between the churches of a multi-confessional state? How were they related to the growing influence of its centralist authorities and to the countervailing resistance from traditionally minded communities? How did (para)military realities impinge on this, and 1 Jo ´ zsef Thim, A magyarorsza´gi 1848-9-iki szerb felkele´s to¨rteńete (3 vols., Bp., 1930–40), iii. 839 f., iii. 730 f., ii, no. 418. 2 Cornelia Bodea (ed.), 1848 la roma ˆ ni: o istorie ˆın date ¸s i ma˘rturii (2 vols., Buch., 1982), nos. 116–21; cf. Victor Cherestes¸iu, Adunarea nat¸ionala˘ de la Blaj (Buch., 1966). ´ tat, église et luttes populaires (Paris, 3 On the manifestations of this within France: Michel Dion, E 1980); Donald Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–96 (Ox., 1982); Reynald Secher, Le Geńocide franco-français: la Vendeé-Venge´ (2nd edn., Paris, 1988); Roger Dupuy, De la re´volution a` la Chouannerie: paysans en Bretagne, 1788–94 (Paris, 1988). On the Neapolitan Sanfedisti: John Davis in Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, ed. Davis and P. Ginsborg (Camb., 1991); Michael G. Broers, ‘The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the Counter-Revolution in Italy’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 33 (1989), 159–74.

Religion and Nation in Hungary

149

what was the role of public order, security, and policing? It is widely held that modern national feeling is rooted in a kind of transformed or converted, secular religiosity. Yet on the other hand the continent has witnessed ethnic movements which remained politically inactive precisely because of their religious content (I shall consider one example later in this essay). The evidence from Hungary may help us evaluate such questions and propositions. Our point of departure lies some sixty years earlier. Before 1790 Hungary presented a peculiar blend of confessions and of peoples who lived side by side without for the most part generating any deep-seated frictions. Their mutual relations were only loosely regulated, except in Transylvania, an old bastion of enforced de facto tolerance, where there were minute injunctions for the coexistence of the received churches (i.e. the Roman Catholics and various Protestant denominations). The contrast with the other Habsburg lands is striking. In Austria religious persecution and confessional cleansing had yielded a uniformity where only a residue of Protestants survived alongside the dominant Catholicism, and without ethnic differentiation: dissidents could be found in equal but small numbers in the German Alpine provinces and in Czech Moravia.4 That outcome in Hungary was not for want of trying by the authorities. After their full assumption of power there, the Habsburgs devoted much effort to implementing the same ecclesiastical policies as elsewhere, with a belated Counter-Reformation campaign which ran until the very eve of Joseph II’s Patent of Toleration. Maria Theresa’s comment in her Politisches Testament that ‘religion yet has much good to do in Hungary’ has already been cited.5 This had consequences for Catholicism: all the traits of patriotic attachment which it was able to display (Hungary as a special Regnum Marianum, or the cult of St Stephen her first king) could not hide the fact that the state church incorporated a broadly cosmopolitan intellectual culture. For the other spiritual communities, the so-called ‘non-Catholics’ (acatholici), the implications were yet farther reaching. They suffered a twofold assault. It was directed on the one hand against Protestants, whose religious observance was first restricted to a small number of approved sites (loci articulati), then further constrained by the grudging terms of the ‘Resolution’ of Charles VI, with coercion sustained under Maria Theresa too. Hungarians exposed to this duress could invoke the God of the Magyars (a magyarok istene), but had to draw the conclusion that their sins—or those of their heretical compatriots—had not yet been expiated.6 On the other hand the regime proceeded against the Orthodox, with the foundation of amphibious 4 Survey by R. J. W. Evans in Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa, ed. Bahlcke and Strohmeyer, 395–412. Cf. Klingenstein, ‘Modes of Religious Tolerance’, and above, ch. 3. 5 A land ‘allwo wegen der Religion noch viel Gutes zu bewu ¨ rcken wa¨re’: Alfred von Arneth, ¨ G 47 (1871), 267–354, at 295. Cf. ‘Zwei Denkschriften der Kaiserin Maria Theresia’, AO above, p. 23. 6 Fundamental for the condition of Protestants before 1781: Eleme ´r Ma´lyusz, A tu¨relmi rendelet (2 vols., Bp., 1939). Many of their grievances appeared in print as Succincta deductio jurium et gravaminum Evangelicorum utriusque confessionis in Hungaria (n.p., 1790).

150

The Rise of Nations

Uniate—otherwise known as Greek-Catholic—churches as Trojan horses, a strategy which after 1773, with the Austrian takeover of numerous longestablished Uniate congregations in Galicia, gained renewed impetus.7 Altogether it was a matter of measures determined and stringent, but rarely insufferable or inhuman by later standards. The most notorious was probably the intermittent forcible seizure of children from mixed marriages, to bring them up in the one true Catholic faith. Discrimination mainly operated in public life and through administrative channels. With the exception of the case of the Rumanian union, to be discussed below, these methods achieved only paltry results: Hungary’s confessional pattern was already fully evolved. Around 1780 it remained to be seen how this pattern would fit with the nationality rivalries which were just emerging within the country.

Ironically it was the emperor-tolerator himself who provoked the first vexation about nationality. We can find the reason for this in the linkage between Joseph’s two chief concerns, centralization and equality. His edicts about toleration and other religious enactments made a huge impact on the Protestant and Eastern churches, even on the Jewish community. Despite the alienation of the Catholic hierarchy (with Archbishop Batthyańy at its head), imperial ecclesiastical policy enjoyed substantial success in Hungary.8 By contrast Joseph’s abrogation of the constitution there and in Transylvania (which had been thrown together with the mother country for precisely that purpose!) proved an almost total failure. The elimination of the diet and the county assemblies, the abolition of serfdom—or what Joseph reckoned such—and the imminent taxation of the nobility, the termination of judicial autonomy and the removal of the crown: all that and much more unleashed a deeply conservative reaction in defence of the traditional national cause. Alongside this, Joseph’s misconceived introduction of German as official language gave rise to another, partly overlapping, ethnically imbued chain of responses which would issue by the middle of the nineteenth century in modern Magyar mass nationalism.9 The starting point was the sudden collapse of the Josephinist experiment in 1790 and the excited mood of the subsequent diet proceedings. While the separate status of Hungary and Transylvania within the Monarchy received confirmation, it became associated with the first traces of an innovative national programme. During the torpid days of the French wars and ensuing restoration, when other forms of change were eschewed, it was demands for the rights of 7 General literature in Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 421 ff. For Galicia, see Julian Pelesz, Geschichte der Union der ruthenischen Kirche mit Rom (2 vols., V., 1878–80). 8 Ma ´lyusz, A tu¨relmi rendelet, i.177 ff. For Batthyańy’s Rimostranza etc., cf. above, pp. 52 f. 9 For the governance of Joseph II in Hungary, Marczali, Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete II. Jo´zsef kora´ban, ii–iii, remains unsurpassed. Introduction to Magyar nationalism by R. J. W. Evans in Nationalismen in Europa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich, ed. U. von Hirschhausen and J. Leonhard (Go¨ttingen, 2001), 291–305, unannotated trans. in The Historian, 77 (2003), 6–12.


151

the Magyar tongue which gained force: from 1805 language laws; from 1825 an Academy (besides the rapidly growing National Museum and other institutions). From 1830 onwards these were married with serious steps towards renewal of the political process and integration of the kingdom on a national base.10 How then did this phenomenon appear from the religious perspective? Confessionally the Magyars were split fourfold: some 55 per cent were Catholic, 30 per cent Reformed (i.e. Calvinist), 10 per cent Evangelical (i.e. Lutheran), and a few Unitarian. That provided no foundation for religious coordination, especially in view of persisting disputes over ecclesiastical policy. Even toleration (as an unconstitutional Josephinist decree) had to be negotiated afresh: the fiercest of altercations at the diet of 1790–1 yielded only a provisional settlement, and a paradoxical one too, in that decisions from case to case had to be left to the house of Habsburg for adjudication.11 In Transylvania everything remained as before anyway. After 1830 the disputed questions flared up again: in particular the issues of mixed marriages (both jurisdiction over them and control over the upbringing of children) and apostasy from Catholicism generated protracted, unsettling, and inconclusive diet debates.12 This situation in itself helps explain the essentially temporal character of modern Magyar national sentiment. Yet in the context of a still largely unsecularized society confessional allegiance necessarily continued to be significant. Despite their antagonism to Joseph, observantly Catholic Magyars were still enmeshed in their Habsburgophile heritage. After 1800 an ultramontane tendency emerged, chiefly among the clergy, who sought (in parallel with the movement in Austria around Clemens Maria Hofbauer) to extricate themselves from what they regarded as tepid Josephinist churchmanship. Certain of the dissolved monasteries, among them the great Benedictine house at Pannonhalma, were re-established.13 Among the more and more nationally-minded Hungarian public, however, ultramontanes could gain no firm foothold. Besides, the previous influence of Catholic prelates in the country’s administration had been largely lost by this time (a decline which was connected to the reduced place for aristocrats in such posts). Instead there arose a liberal Catholicism, especially among the laity. This current, which became pivotal for the entire political history of Hungary, already brought forth a number of prominent figures in our period. Istvań Szećhenyi was the son of a former Josephinist, who later spent his time in Vienna and worked 10 Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s, deals comprehensively with this crucial diet. For constitutional enactments about language: Gy. Szekfu˝ (ed.), Iratok a magyar a´llamnyelv ke´rde´seńek to¨rteńete´hez, 1790–1848 (Bp., 1926). More on all this in next chapter. 11 Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s, ii. 221–96. 12 Seriously underrated by historians. But see Miha ´ly Horva´th, Huszono¨t év Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme´bo˝l 1823-to´l 1848-ig (2 vols., Geneva, 1864), i. 320 ff., 551–4, 609 ff.; ii. 82 ff., 197 ff. Cf. George Ba´rańy, ‘The Liberal Challenge and its Limitations: The Religious Question at the Diet of 1843–4’, in Hungary and European Civilization, ed. Gy. Rańki (Bp., 1989), 31–77, almost the only recent commentator on these important events. 13 Antal Meszle ńyi, A jozefinizmus kora Magyarorsza´gon, 1780–1846 (Bp., 1934). For Austria, Rudolf Till, Hofbauer und sein Kreis (V., 1951).

152

The Rise of Nations

closely with Hofbauer as one of the founders of the ultramontane camp. Szećhenyi fils was a romantic, whose diaries are full of explicitly religious yearning, and who proclaimed a kind of spiritual rebirth among the Magyars. But as politician he emancipated himself from all clerical partiality and tended to advocate liberal principles.14 His younger aristocratic colleague and friend, Lajos Batthyańy (later minister president) was a foremost spokesman in the Upper House for the rights of the non-Catholic churches. Ferenc Dea´k, by origins a typical representative of the Catholic gentry from western Hungary, with stiff moral sense, nevertheless affirmed a liberal ordering of the state shorn of any ecclesiastical privilege. Above all we may think of Dea´k’s fellow-tribune, Jo´zsef Eo¨tvo¨s. From a clerical-conservative family; a Habsburg loyalist and lifelong seeker after ethical precepts to underpin modern society; a friend of progressive Catholic thinkers abroad, such as Montalembert and Acton: Eo¨tvo¨s demanded the fullest equalization of all the country’s religions, including the Jewish.15 Liberal Hungary (with all its flaws) was in considerable degree a creation of Catholic believers: that explains the otherwise curious absence of confessional parties among the Magyars throughout almost the whole of the nineteenth century. The involvement of Protestants in it is better known. They, and in particular the exclusively Magyar Reformed, naturally found it easier after 200 years of persecution to combine anti-Habsburg politics with confessional ressentiment. However, the Patent of Toleration had not completely failed in its purpose: the integration of Protestants into the elites of central and local government, their closer contacts with Vienna (also for theological training), even their participation in pan-monarchic institutions such as the joint army, assumed greater proportions. Some of them grew loyalist and quite conservative. We can measure that, for instance, by their manifestations of gratitude to the ruler at the time of the Reformation jubilee in 1817, as by the reduced intensity of their German and other foreign connections, their Austrian-inspired methods of education (despite introduction of the native language for certain subjects), and the subordination of their clergy to lay curators from the ranks of the gentry.16 As a result the tendency, especially among Calvinists, to regard Protestant Magyars as God’s chosen people started to fade, along with habitual allusions to parallels with the Jews and expectations of redemption from alien rule. Their invocation For the literature on the younger Szećhenyi, see below, ch. 10, nn. 43–6. Andra´s Molna´r, Batthyańy Lajos a reformkorban (Zalaegerszeg, 1996). Most recently on Dea´k in this connection: A. Molna´r (ed.), Zala ko¨vete, Pest ke´pviselo˝je: Dea´k Ferenc orsza´ggyu˝le´si teve´kenyse´ge, 1833–73 (Zalaegerszeg, 2004), 13–90. English outline in Be´la K. Kira´ly, Ferenc Dea´k (Boston, 1975). Istvań Schlett, Eo¨tvo¨s Jo´zsef (Bp., 1987). For the relevance of the Jewish question, which cannot be pursued here, cf. suggestions by R. J. W. Evans in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 46 (2001), 55–65. 16 Jakob Glatz (ed.), Az ausztriai tsa ´ sz. kir. birodalomban 1817-ben tartatott reforma´tzio´ ¨ sterreichs erstes harmadik sza´zados o¨ro¨minnepeńek elo˝ada´sa (V., 1818); cf. Wichmann von Meding, O Reformationsjubilaüm: Jakob Glatz und die Gemeinden A.K., 1817–18 ((Frankfurt a.M., 1998). In general: Miha´ly Bucsay, Der Protestantismus in Ungarn, vol. ii: 1711–1978 (V., 1979), 68 ff. 14 15


153

of the ‘God of the Magyars’ was less often to be heard (though not unknown among Catholics too—as with Batthyańy during his days of despair in 184817). Once the Reformed were able to set themselves up as an old-new establishment in eastern Hungary and Transylvania after the decline of the CounterReformation, the more exposed, less numerous Lutherans became the militant arm of Magyar Protestantism. Their most famous scion was Lajos [Louis] Kossuth, whose at times almost messianically tinged self-assurance testified, like the cadences of his speeches, to an orthodox education in the faith.18 The revolutionary poet Sańdor Peto˝fi also belonged to this denomination. Already at the time of the toleration movement the Evangelicals had begun to work more closely with the Reformed. Later they latched on to the Prussian example of a church union. In 1840 an aristocrat from northern Hungary, Ka´roly Zay, unveiled the most ambitious piece of Magyar religious policy in the Vorma¨rz when he initiated a plan to fuse Lutherans and Calvinists in his region. (I shall return to this later.) The attempt came to nothing. Even without considering the Unitarians, who were established in Kolozsva´r and in certain Szekler districts, we are forced to the conclusion that religion can have played no very large part in this epoch of breakthrough for the formation of modern Magyar national feeling. Just that circumstance may help us understand how Hungarian reformist leaders without distinction of confession could allow themselves to be party to a particularly offensive measure precisely in the field of ecclesiastical policy. We should not begrudge them their zeal for the national language: it was not their fault that other liberal achievements were constantly denied them by the Viennese authorities. The use of Hungarian as a medium of government made eminent sense; so too within limits its introduction at county and school level. From 1830 onwards, however, it was stipulated, first semi-officially in the localities, then in 1840 with the force of law, that all churches should after three years’ grace employ Magyar in their registers, minutes, and so forth, where appropriate also in their liturgy, and that in future all priests should be competent in that language.19 The practical consequences of this step were slight; but the ideological ones, as we shall see, were drastic.

The religious characteristic of the Croats was their exclusive allegiance to Roman Catholicism. In itself this should hardly surprise us: after all, they were settled in the south-western periphery of Hungary, next to Italians and Slovenes, among whom—on the other side of the border—Catholicism likewise predominated. The church certainly occupied a central place in the cultural life of the Croats; an astute bishop of Zagreb could exert powerful political sway, as was confirmed ´ rpa´d Ka´rolyi, Ne´metu´jva´ri gf. Batthyańy Lajos elso˝ magyar miniszterelno¨k fo˝benja´ro´ po¨re 17 A (2 vols., Bp., 1932), i. 367. 18 Domokos Kosa ´ry, Kossuth Lajos a reformkorban (Bp., 1946), esp. 42 ff. 19 Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 231 ff., 622–5; Szekfu˝ (ed.), Iratok, 133 ff., 170 ff.

154

The Rise of Nations

around the turn of the century by Makso Vrhovac with his moderate reform proposals and shrewd patronage.20 But other things were more important for the Croats’ national consciousness. They retained their traditional constitution, more accurately their ‘municipal rights’ under the crown of St Stephen, with viceroy (ban) and diet (sabor); they had their ancestral society led by a high nobility and by imperial army officers in the parts of the country along the Military Frontier. In fact modern national sentiment, with a stress on language, the Volksgeist, and ethnic solidarity, was remarkably slow to develop among the Croats: it finally emerged only from the 1830s, on a circuitous route via the so-called Illyrian movement, and with a fiercely anti-Magyar edge.21 Yet the Croats’ confessional exclusivity mattered greatly in one respect. It was legally ordained, and could be salvaged after 1790 along with other constituents of the country’s historic privileges. It protected Croatia from Protestant immigration, which was equated with Magyar influence: more and more the belief gained ground that all the intrigues of the Hungarian opposition, supposedly directed to the Magyarization and Gleichschaltung of Croatia, derived from Protestants or free-thinkers. In this way inherited religious prejudices were woven into the fabric of a modern quarrel over nationality. The two other peoples in Hungary with allegiance to Latin Christianity display some common features. Germans and Slovaks numbered about two million each among the inhabitants of the crown of St Stephen; both divided into a Catholic majority and a Lutheran minority. Beyond this their national consciousness was encumbered by other factors: a discontinuous or physically splintered area of settlement; marked dialectal divergences; lack of recognized leadership groups. The churches remained the chief institutional carriers of their cultural commonalities. Most of the Catholic Germans (‘Swabians’) were recently immigrated peasants on the plain lands, whose churches, at the centre of their tidy and rationally planned colonial villages, assuredly infused them with a kind of ethnic pride over against the indigenous ‘nationalists’—administrative parlance, as we have seen, for the other peoples, largely Serbs and Rumanians, among whom they lived—as well as even the local Magyar notables. However, they raised no special political claims at this time (nor did they later, on the whole) either within or beyond their religious community. The same went for the autochthonous German Catholics in the far west of the country, loyal members of Hungarian society who provided some recruits for high ecclesiastical office.22 Horvat, Kultura Hrvata, ii. 149 ff., 220 ff., on Vrhovac. Balanced introduction in Kessler, Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft. Cf. Fancev (ed.), Dokumenti, and above, p. 144 . 22 Johann H. Schwicker, Die Deutschen in Ungarn und Siebenbu ¨ rgen (V./Teschen, 1881); W. Hambuch (ed.), 300 Jahre Zusammenleben: Aus der Geschichte der Ungarndeutschen (2 vols., Bp., 1988). 20 21


155

A good example is Johann Ladislas Pyrker, one of the best-known poets of the Austrian Vorma¨rz, who pursued his clerical career on both banks of the Leitha: as a Cistercian in Austria, then a bishop in Hungary, patriarch of Venice, and finally a Hungarian archbishop.23 The attitude of native German Lutherans, on the one hand to Hungary and on the other to the Habsburg state as a whole, was more complicated. In the west and north of the kingdom they were mainly town dwellers, with quite vigorous links to the imperial capital Vienna; yet they felt estranged from it by the petty, reactionary, economically discriminative government policy in the age of Metternich. All the more did they warm to the progressive ideas of their Magyar co-religionists. Yet this relationship was not untroubled either: Magyar reformers inveighed against the municipal privileges of the burghers, while many Germans viewed Hungarian noble society mistrustfully—with a degree of envy indeed, but at times also with disdain.24 The Glatz family affords eloquent testimony to this state of mind. Father Jakob, from Deutschendorf/Poprad, was a Protestant clergyman in Vienna and Pressburg: a Hungarian patriot, but simultaneously one of the first consciously German intellectuals in the land. His son Eduard, who became a journalist, could probably already be described in a certain sense as a nationalist. In the 1840s he accepted Magyar as the state language in Hungary, but with the reservation that the other nationalities were being exposed thereby to a ‘struggle with unequal weapons’. At the same time his biting Xenien (1842) castigated the new nation of state as a ‘people of the steppes’: ‘When we could count eminent men, they wrote in German and Latin; now everyone writes in Magyar, we have no great spirits.’ And at times Glatz’s verse strikes an openly chauvinist tone, calling on the German blood in the heart of the Swabians, the German sources of the Danube, and the German flag which rules that waterway, to keep Hungary’s arrogant lords at bay.25 Yet more complicated was this question of identity among the Saxons, the inhabitants for centuries of certain tracts of land in the Zips and in Transylvania. Among the Saxons ecclesiastical and civil administration more or less coincided, especially in Transylvania, where they alone adhered, as a body, to Lutheranism, and where the Sachsenland formed an almost complete national community from peasants up to the quasi-noble patricians. The Saxons had long been conscious Germans—already by the 1790s the circle around Schlo¨zer at Go¨ttingen designated them ‘Germanissimi Germanorum’, as we shall see in a later chapter.26 That meant Kaisertreue, fealty to the Habsburgs, in the first See Pyrker’s autobiography, Mein Leben, 1772–1847, ed. A. P. Czigler (V., 1966). Be´la Pukańszky, Ne´met polga´rsa´g magyar fo¨ldo¨n (Bp. [1944]), 32 ff. 25 Ruprecht Steinacker, ‘Jakob Glatz und die Entstehung des ungarndeutschen Volksbewußtseins’, in Festschrift Roland Steinacker (Stuttgart, 1960), 126–53. Eduard Glatz, Deutsche Xenien aus und fu¨r Ungarn (Leipzig, 1842), 24 and appendix; id., Das deutsche Element in Ungarn und seine Aufgabe (Leipzig, 1843). Original quoted below, pp. 231 f. 26 Cf. below, p. 221. 23 24

156

The Rise of Nations

instance; Saxons continually appealed to the Viennese authorities for protection against Magyar impositions. But they too could find the paternalist and ethnically lukewarm Vorma¨rz regime a thorn in the flesh, and they began to emphasize their adherence to the more up-to-date Germandom on offer beyond the borders of the Monarchy. What was the role of religion here? Undoubtedly their Evangelical faith continued to contribute both to the Saxons’ reserve vis-a`-vis Austria (even if individual Lutherans had made notable careers in Habsburg service since the days of Samuel Brukenthal under Maria Theresa), and to their sense of difference from the other churches within Transylvania. The entire structure of culture and communal life in the Sachsenland depended on it. My impression, however, is that clerical influence among the Saxons—particularly of the bishops—tended to decrease.27 There was indeed one great exception: the estimable and genial pastor Stephan Ludwig Roth; but for all his burning patriotism, Roth became known as an advocate of deeper and more universal values. In 1842 he published his controversial denunciation of Magyarism, which was simultaneously an appeal for ethnic variety: ‘We should seek to promote such diversity, were it not through the force of circumstances already present in practice.’ Even in the years of revolution, which proved fatal to him personally, Roth elevated the Gospel above ‘this rage of language conflicts’.28

As previously indicated, the situation developed rather similarly, mutatis mutandis, among the Slovaks, or (Upper-Hungarian) Slavs, as they were mostly still called at this time. Their contest with the dominant Magyar ideology was already more sharply articulated before 1848, precisely because the Magyars themselves believed they had discovered a vanguard of pan-Slavism in this Slavonic population which they simultaneously scorned as primitive. For those reasons (too complicated to elaborate here), the ‘to´t’—the Magyars’ own term for a member of the ethnic group in question—became an ever more inferior and politically suspect figure. Nonetheless the Slovak response remained within bounds, both in spite and because of religious factors, as events in 1848–9 would confirm. Most Slovaks belonged to a country-wide Catholic church, which while it granted them no real scope for autonomy did offer two kinds of wider opportunity. As individuals they could rise to high ecclesiastical office without having wholly to abandon their nationality. A good instance of that in the Vorma¨rz was Alexander Rudnay, who after many years as a parish priest among his own people 27 Hermann Jekeli, Die Bischo ¨fe der evangelischen Kirche A.B. in Siebenbu¨rgen, vol. i (Cologne, 1978), 227 ff., suggests this conclusion. 28 Stephan L. Roth, Der Sprachkampf in Siebenbu ¨ rgen (Kronstadt, 1842), 29 ff. On him, see Otto Folberth, Der Prozeß Stephan Ludwig Roth: Ein Kapitel Nationalita¨tengeschichte Su¨dosteuropas im 19. Jahrhundert (Graz/Cologne, 1959).


157

occupied the dignity of primate of Hungary between 1819 and 1833. To Rudnay is attributed the remark, almost an anticipation of Pope John Paul II: ‘Slavus sum, etsi in Cathedra Petri forem, slavus essem.’29 Yet he enjoyed a good reputation with the Magyars too, the kind of balancing act which would admittedly become harder and harder to sustain after the early 1830s. There was also the chance to foster, in a modest way, the less conspicuous kinds of national attribute. This process set in among Slovak priests quite early and was—as we saw in the last chapter—decisively advanced by the Josephinist reform programme. Whereas some dedicated themselves to Slavonic antiquities, with stress on the history of the Great Moravian empire, which they portrayed as the oldest state formation on Hungarian soil, the most famous representative of this school, Anton Bernola´k, produced pioneering work on the Slovak language, culminating in a posthumously published dictionary. Other clerics instituted literary associations (tovarisˇstvo) to cultivate the vernacular tongue: the bestknown of them proved to be the Slovenske´ Ucˇene´ Tovarisˇstvo, 90 per cent of whose more than 400 members consisted of priests.30 In this fashion Catholic church and nationality could complement each other among the Slovaks from around 1790. However, we should not exaggerate the extent of their overlap. On the one hand the most effective organizers were frequently and increasingly laymen: I think, for example, of the enterprising Martin Hamuljak, an official at the Lieutenancy Council in Buda.31 On the other hand the priestly purveyors of national cultural values had no ambition to be the leaders of any political movement: I think here, for example, of the generation of popular improvers and edifiers—Juraj Fańdly and others—at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as Jań Holly´, the most acclaimed lyricist of Slovak romanticism, in the seclusion of his vicarage at Madunice near Trnava.32 All in all this Catholicism with ethnic tinge was hardly capable even of bridging the dialectal (and other) divergences within the Slovak area of settlement, let alone of raising a serious barrier to the spread of Magyarization. The Lutheran minority (about 20 per cent) were much more combative in this regard. They felt isolated and vulnerable, not least since the language question was far acuter in the Protestant than in the Catholic liturgy. They could indeed (or so they believed) draw on foreign support, in the first place on the tested tradition of a common ‘Czecho-Slovak’ language of ritual and culture. But that tradition might prove two-edged, especially in ecclesiastical terms: there were, after all, precious few real Protestants in Bohemia (in fact the remnant had to be nourished from Hungary, as the career of the most celebrated of them, Frantisˇek 29 ‘I am a Slav; and if I occupied the Chair of Peter, I should still be a Slav.’ Meszle ńyi, Magyar hercegprı´ma´sok, 168–204; cf. id., Jozefinizmus, 225 ff. 30 On Bernola ´k, cf. above, ch. 8, n. 37. On the associations: Jozef Butvin, Slovenske´ na´rodnozjednocovacie hnutie, 1780–1848 (Brat., 1965); Hucˇko, Socia´lne zlozˇenie, who demonstrates a regressive trend in the figures for priestly participation. 31 Augustı ń Mat’ovcˇ´ık, Martin Hamuljak, 1789–1859: zˇivot, dielo, osobnost’ (Brat., 1971). 32 Gogola ´k, Beitra¨ge, esp. 84 ff., 119 ff. Fańdly, Vy´ber z diela.

158

The Rise of Nations

Palacky´, bears witness); while considerable differences obtained in everyday speech.33 Equally important were influences from Germany, where most of the Lutheran exponents of the Slovak cause had studied theology. Their leading spokesman was Jań Kolla´r, author of the first rebuttal of the new Magyar claims to domination in Upper Hungary. Kolla´r was a contradictory phenomenon: minister of the trilingual Evangelical congregation in Pest and married to a German, but an unworldly fanatic for the great Slav idea; prickly, somewhat elitist and conservative in temperament, ‘nothing but an upright petty bourgeois in the style of the late-pietistic German Lutheran Biedermeier’, as one (non-Slovak) historian has spitefully described him. At all events Kolla´r’s highly coloured poem Sla´vy dcera [‘The Daughter of Sla´va’], as well as his ideal of the mutuality (Wechselseitigkeit) between Slavonic peoples enkindled for a whole generation, from the 1820s till shortly before the revolution, a surge in Slovak self-awareness and a genuine mutuality between that and the Lutheran church.34 This development reached its peak in the early 1840s. At that point there appeared the legislation, already mentioned, on the use of Magyar in ecclesiastical proceedings, and shortly afterwards Zay’s project, likewise alluded to earlier, for a merger of the Evangelicals with the Reformed in the interest of progress under the aegis of a prospective liberal Hungarian state. The Slav side repaid these provocations in kind. ‘Our churches have become . . . language schools’, complained Kolla´r to the (Slavophile) minister of state Kolowrat; ‘our schools are mere factories of linguistic instruction, word-smithies; our church congresses are politico-revolutionary clubs; our houses and families, our villages and towns, yes entire counties seem to be the habitations of truculent demons and furies.’ A Slovak petition was prepared against a Magyar race ‘which slumbered for centuries in its wastelands’, but now sought to impose upon its more civilized neighbours ‘a language of the Pusta [sic], short of roots, lacking all instruction, cobbling together words from high and low’.35 This appeal (Recursus in negotiis Slavicis), with over 200 signatures, all from Lutherans (the Catholics held aloof, partly for tactical reasons), was handed over to the imperial authorities in Vienna by a delegation of clerical dignitaries, among them two superintendents, Jozeffy and Seberini. Its prime instigator, however, was a young teacher at the Evangelical gymnasium in Pressburg, L’udevit Sˇtu´r, a former prote´ge´ of Count Zay (on whose estates he had grown up), now an inveterate foe of all things Magyar. And although the petition 33 Praz ˇa´k, Cˇeske´ obrozenı´, esp. 267–97, 336–41, from the Czech viewpoint. Richard Prazˇa´k, Mad’arska´ reformovana´ inteligence v ˇceske´m obrozenı´ (Pr., 1962); id., Cˇesko-mad’arske´ kulturnı´ vztahy, od osvıćenstvı´ do roku 1848 (Brno, 1994). Ma´ria Vyvı´jalova´, Juraj Palkovicˇ, 1769–1850 (Brat., 1968). 34 Praz ˇa´k, Cˇeske´ obrozenı´, 368–404; La´szlo´ Sziklai, Szomsze´dainkro´l: A kelet-euro´pai irodalom ke´rde´sei (Bp., 1974), 118–49; Gogola´k, Beitra¨ge, 47 ff. (quoted). 35 This episode is covered in loving detail by Daniel Rapant, Slovensky ´ prestolny´ prosbopis z roku 1842 (2 vols., Liptovsky´ Sva¨ty´ Mikula´ˇs, 1943), quoted from nos. 150, 6. Cf. Evans, ‘Language and State-Building’, 10.


159

yielded only meagre results, the advent of Sˇtu´r signalled a turning point in the Slovak national movement. With his colleagues Hodzˇa (minister at Liptovsky´ Mikula´ˇs) and Hurban (minister at Hluboka´), he resolved to introduce a more demotic and no longer ‘Czecho-Slovak’ literary language, which then through the columns of Sˇtu´r’s freshly-established newspaper (Slovenskje Na´rodnˇje Novini, in the original orthography) quickly made its mark on the mass of his compatriots.36 It might appear that a kind of clerical politics had triumphed in the Slovak national camp. Yet such a conclusion would be rather delusory. Sˇtu´r himself, although decisively shaped by the local Evangelical heritage, was no theologian; moreover some of the most fervent of his adherents, like Daxner and Francisci, followed newer professions (most were jurists, with a sprinkling of physicians). Besides, their linguistic innovation—even if it rested on a rather different base than Bernola´k’s—involved a reconciliation with Catholic vernacular traditions, which tended to weaken the force of confessionalism on both sides (we shall find something similar among the Rumanians). Anyway Sˇtu´r’s new political course did not satisfy everyone, even within the Lutheran party. His newspaper enjoyed the backing of the Metternich regime, and some of those of liberal persuasion, including superindentents Jozeffy and Seberini, began to move over to the Magyar side.37 Finally we should not forget that for a good many of these faithful the service of God remained more important than any worldly commitments, including the dictates of national feeling. Not for nothing did some Slovaks in the Vorma¨rz reproach the Magyars for replacing religion with nationality.

Here I should like to digress briefly about a people who shared some affinity with the Slovaks, even if they lived geographically far distant from them in the British Isles and in different political circumstances. The Welsh were likewise inhabitants of a largely barren, infertile, and outlying highland region. They were peasants, artisans, small traders, without major urban centres: the larger towns lay on the margins of the country and exhibited no markedly Welsh character. Their traditional industry (apart from some textiles) was mining (copper, lead, and silver extraction, as in central Slovakia), and this began to expand in the early nineteenth century (great ironworks and later coalpits arose), but again mostly in the areas bordering on England.38 36 A good survey of research on S ˇtu´r in the collective volume L’udovı´t Sˇtu´r und die slawische Wechselseitigkeit, ed. Holotı´k. On his newspaper: Ma´ria Vyvı´jalova´, Slovenskje Na´rodnˇje Novini: Boje o ich povolenie (Martin, 1972). Cf. also R. J. W. Evans in Lajos Kossuth Sent Word . . . Papers Delivered on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of Kossuth’s Birth, ed. L. Pe´ter et al. (L., 2003), 119–33. 37 Gogola ´k, Beitra¨ge, 218 ff.; Lajos Steier, A to´t nemzetise´gi ke´rde´s 1848-9-ben (2 vols., Bp., 1937), i. 17 ff. 38 The best current introduction to Welsh history is John Davies, A History of Wales (London, 1990); cf. Prys Morgan and David Thomas, Wales: The Shaping of a Nation (Newton Abbot, 1984).

160

The Rise of Nations

Wales possessed at this time no self-government: its counties—like the comitates of Upper Hungary—were entirely absorbed into the British political and legal system and managed by an Anglicized landed class. Socio-economically the country was in close but peripheral connection with the ‘centre’ of the state on the English ‘great plain’. The Welsh could make good as Britons, or better still as English people; but they were undervalued in themselves, even derided, like Slovaks by Magyars, in fair measure because of their totally separate language, which had been eliminated from public life since the acts of incorporation as far back as the 1530s. In Welsh there was much dialect, but also a recognized standard written variety as carrier of a venerable literary culture. The Welsh were as ardent about early history as the Slovaks, and sought proof of their claims to be the true ancient Britons. Most to the point for our purposes: here too the bulk of the population had long been incorporated in the (Anglican) state church; but a growing minority of ‘Dissenters’ or ‘Nonconformists’ stood outside it. In the nineteenth century, after the secession of the Methodists, that minority became a majority (even if subdivided into several sects). These Welsh Nonconformists used the native language; and they were the main cultivators of the national culture.39 Contemporary Wales, however, witnessed no political movement of its own. Membership in a dynamic modern state and worldwide empire; liberal tendencies in government (just think of Gladstone, who enjoyed huge popularity in Wales!); scope for social mobility; approval of a civilization which operated in commercial, technical, and scientific terms according to an English model and in the English language: all that made for an almost conflict-free coexistence of Celtic and British elements in the life of this community. Wales is thus a model for the possibilities and limits of an ethnic culture with strong religious cast. The latter was unquestionably fortified by national feeling: Nonconformists held that their faith, and their language, stood closer to heaven than the practices of the materialist English. Yet care of souls continued to be just that, a spiritual priority.40 In the context of the present essay it is worth holding this liminal case in mind.

I return now to our prime concerns. Adherents of the Eastern churches in Hungary fell into three groups of peoples, none of them straightforward. The 39 On the history of Welsh, see now the outstanding series Social History of the Welsh Language, ed. G. H. Jenkins, esp. The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution (Cardiff, 1997), Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century (Cardiff, 1998), and The Welsh Language and its Social Domains, 1801–1911 (Cardiff, 2000). More on Welsh–Slovak linguistic parallels in my chapter in Language and Community, 397–424. For the influence of religion: Glanmor Williams, Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales (Cardiff, 1979); id., The Welsh and their Religion (Cardiff, 1991); Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales, 1642–1780 (Ox., 1987). 40 Thoughtful analyses for the high period of Nonconformity in Robin Okey, ‘Education and Nationhood in Wales, 1850–1940’, in Schooling, Educational Policy and Ethnic Identity, ed. J. Tomiak (Aldershot, 1991), 35–62; R. Tudur Jones, ‘Religion, Nationality and State in Wales, 1840–90’, in Religion, State and Ethnic Groups, ed. D. Kerr (Aldershot, 1992), 261–76; Welsh Language and its Social Domains (n. 39, above), passim.


161

Ruthenes in the north-east of the country, numerically the smallest and socioeconomically the most backward of all the nationalities treated here, had been won quite early and—give or take the occasional bout of apostasy—nearly wholesale for a union with Catholicism. As a result they possessed their own diocese (later divided into two), and their very scanty intelligentsia consisted in this period almost entirely of priests. Outstanding among these was Bishop Andrej Bachynskii, who died in 1809. Yet all of them, from Bachynskii down, occupied themselves principally with devotional and edificatory tasks. They elaborated no national programme. The first Ruthene to engage himself in ethnic politics, Adolf Dobrianskii, who in 1849 guided the invading Russian troops across the Carpathian passes into Hungary, was at the same time—as an engineer—one of their first secular specialists.41 The two other nationalities, Serbs and Rumanians, display certain common features which distinguished them from most of the other peoples of Hungary, and which call for attention in what follows as we revert to our initial and underlying enquiry about the revolutionary wars of 1848–9. Both ethnic groups lived in comparatively remote parts of the kingdom, which had, at least in part, their own territorial status. These included in both cases portions of the Military Frontier which was run directly by the War Council in Vienna. Both maintained links to foreign neighbours, particularly in ecclesiastical affairs, and Russia belonged in their calculations. Moreover, Serbs and Rumanians actually overspread each other in a manner, puzzling to the modern mind, which engendered far more strife than harmony, since state officials throughout the period treated them as a single religious community. Yet their national political aspirations were very divergent, and in this respect the Serbs held all the cards. Serbs (generally called ‘Rascians’ [Ratzen or Raitzen] or ‘Illyrians’ at the time) still enjoyed privileges which had been accorded them in the aftermath of the Velka seoba, or ‘Great Migration’ of the 1690s, when a large number of them migrated under Patriarch Arsenije Cˇrnojevic´ from the Balkans into southern Hungary.42 These privileges were diverse and in part contradictory. In 1848–9 Serbian spokesmen claimed that they had come ‘not as colonists, but as a state with laws . . . church, courts and fighting power’.43 In fact it was probably more a matter of temporary entitlements (initially in expectation of a speedy return to the old homeland). By now the main issue related to the scope of the privileges. Were they valid only in the ecclesiastical sphere, or could they support a claim to secular autonomy, with a key role for the priestly hierarchy? Here Latinists could vie. ‘Liceat vobis’, it was granted in one place, ‘inter vos, ex propria facultate, ex natione et lingua Rasciana constituere archiepiscopum’, a prelate who should 41 L’udovit Haraksim, K socia ´ lnym a kultu´rnym dejina´m Ukrajincov na Slovensku do roku 1867 (Brat., 1961), esp. 66 ff. 42 Schwicker, Politische Geschichte; J. Radonic ´ and M. Kostic´ (ed.), Srpske privilegije od 1690 do 1792 (Belgrade, 1954). Cf. above, p. 8. 43 Thim, Szerb felkele ´s to¨rteńete, iii, no. 674.

162

The Rise of Nations

regulate order in the church and manage its property. Elsewhere, however, it was decreed ‘ut omnes ab Archiepiscopo, tanquam capite suo ecclesiastico, tam in spiritualibus quam saecularibus dependeant’.44 During the eighteenth century the Serbs continually skirmished with Habsburg authority. Their rights, even though progressively eroded, afforded the most effective defence against strong Catholic backing for a breakaway Uniate church (which remained tiny). Moreover, the Serbs contested Maria Theresa’s and Joseph’s reform measures against an excess of saints’ days, against superstitious customs (especially at funerals, as may be recalled), against conventional methods of education.45 Thereby they steeled themselves as a confessional community. Beneath the surface, however, the Magyars always counted as the chief adversaries. By the end of the 1780s two new factors had begun to deepen this opposition: the reintegration of the Banat, where most of the Hungarian Serbs lived, into the general civil administration of the country; and the emergence of sentiments of ethnic solidarity on both sides. In 1790 this rancour reached a first stage of confrontation with the Sabor (Congress) of Temesva´r. Contrary to the opinion of his agitated Hungarian— already proto-Magyar—advisers, that ‘the self-styled ‘‘Illyrian Nation’’ has no political existence as a nation within the Hungarian state’, Leopold II allowed the ‘numerous and respectable nation’ of the Serbs to hold a grand assembly. Control over it fell to the clergy, and one principal outcome of the Sabor was the choice of a new primate, in the person of the intransigent Metropolitan Stratimirovic´. A veritable calumniation of the Magyars as Asiatic barbarians set in. Alongside this the agenda focused on protection of the privileges, and their expansion through the establishment of an autonomous Banat or (in Serbian) ‘Vojvodina’.46 Yet the delegates came in equal proportions from priesthood, nobles, soldiers, and burghers, and this also led to differences. A minority of these well-to-do Orthodox landowners, military officers, and merchants sought representation at the Hungarian diet and saw through the policy of Vienna, which gave only guarded encouragement to Serbian demands since, as a government official put it, ‘the common good depends entirely upon a separation of both these nations, so that the one may keep the other in respect’. Or, as folk wisdom had it: Magyar and Ratz—dogs and cats. Ratz and Magyar—strife the whole year.47 44 ‘Be it lawful for you to constitute among yourselves, on your own authority, an archbishop Rascian in nation and language . . . [whereas] all should be dependent on the archbishop, as their ecclesiastical head, in both spiritual and secular matters.’ Radonic´ and Kostic´, Srpske privilegije, 23–5, 48, 53, 64. 45 Cf. Kostic ´, Grof Koler, though he surely exaggerates the uniformity of resistance. 46 Gavrilovic ´ and Petrovic´ (ed.), Temisˇvarski Sabor, esp. nos. 35, 69 (cited); cf., from the Hungarian viewpoint, Ma´lyusz (ed.), Sańdor Lipo´t, esp. 53 ff. 47 ‘Magyaren und Raczen / Hunde and Katzen. Racz und Magyar / Zank das ganze Jahr’: Gavrilovic´ and Petrovic´ (ed.), Temisˇvarski Sabor, no. 192; Ma´lyusz, Sańdor Lipo´t, 236 f.


163

A chancery granted to the Serbs as a measure of home rule in 1791 was withdrawn to appease Hungarian feeling only a year later. The Rumanians (or Wallachs of contemporary parlance) had already tried to play the Habsburg card. After the Austrian takeover of Transylvania they entered into a union with the Catholics in order to better their social and constitutional situation. However, their first, dauntless champion, Bishop Inochentie MicuKlein, was referred from Vienna to the local diet, where the Hungarian and Saxon estates dismissed his people as a superstitious, nomadic, and thievish rabble, ‘quos in sensu stricto et conveniente nationem appellare neutiquam quadrat’.48 Among the Rumanians themselves a cleft opened up, with frequent relapses into the old faith, whereas most popes could not understand what distinguished one denomination from the other. According to an inquiry around 1750, many Uniate clergy believed that the head of their church was either the nearest Orthodox bishop, or the Eastern patriarch, or the emperor.49 Things were worse still for those who had stayed within Orthodoxy. In Transylvania their confession, although the most numerous, was merely tolerated, not legally recognized; until the 1760s it had no head, and even thereafter only a Serbian one. In the Banat, where Rumanians and Serbs lived alongside each other, the former thus counted as inferior members of a common ‘Greek’ church (ritus Graeci non uniti) under Serbian leadership. The Wallachian peasantry was indeed a socially and economically oppressed, brutalized, and enserfed population, whose periodic insurgencies might be accompanied by ritualistic violence, even in inter-ethnic conflict with the Uniates: burning of icons, disinterment of corpses, etc.50 Its excesses of this kind against other nationalities could be all the more ferocious, above all in 1784, in an outburst of the most primitive frenzy. At that time, in the Horea rising, Magyar nobles were presented with the alternative of either being slaughtered on the spot, or converting to Orthodoxy with forfeit of all their worldly goods.51 This revolt, which was suppressed with commensurate savagery, contributed in its humble way to a revaluation of Orthodoxy as an ethnically tinged confession among the Rumanians. After the turn of the century indigenous bishops were nominated, first at Blaj, then at Arad in the north of the Banat. Meanwhile, however, the Uniates undertook more significant steps at the interface between nation and church with the work of the so-called Transylvanian School, a group of priests who mostly functioned as teachers at the episcopal gymnasium in Blaj. 48 ‘whom in the strict and appropriate sense it is in no way fitting to call a nation’: Bernath, Anfa¨nge der ruma¨nischen Nationsbildung. Classic account by Nicolae Iorga, Istoria romaˆnilor din Ardeal ¸si Ungaria, ed. G. Penelea (Buch., 1989), 220 ff. Latest on Micu-Klein’s fate: Francisc Pall, Ein siebenbu¨rgischer Bischof im ro¨mischen Exil: Inochentie Micu-Klein (Cologne, 1991). 49 Violeta Barbu, ‘Biserica roma ˆna˘ unita˘ cu Roma ˆın ca˘uterea identitaˇ¸tii: problema ritului ¸si activitatea misionarilor iezuit¸i’, Revista Istorica˘, ns 3 (1992), 529–45, at 539. 50 Iorga, Istoria roma ˆ nilor, 274 ff.; Gh. Ciuhandu, Schit¸e din trecutul romaˆnilor ara˘deni din veacul XVIII. (Arad, 1934), esp. 47 ff.; Mircea Pa˘curariu, Istoria Bisericii Ortodoxe Romaˆne (3 vols., 51 David Prodan, Ra ˘ scoala lui Horea (2 vols., Buch., 1979). Buch., 1980–1), ii.

164

The Rise of Nations

Samuil Micu-Klein, Gheorghe S¸incai, Petru Maior, and others grew up in the fertile soil of Josephinism and then became acquainted with further imperial and Roman-Catholic traditions. Their rather isolated, unworldly, theoretical, but searing commitment to a grandiose vision of their own nation in its historical evolution may remind us a little of the Slovak movement around Kolla´r: but in the present case we are dealing not with pan-Slavism, but with Daco-Romanism.52 Politically these clerics repeated the strategy of Inochentie Micu-Klein (Samuil’s uncle): in 1791, in collaboration with a few lower administrators and frontier officers, they handed over to the authorities a new petition for acknowledgment of their nationality and church in Transylvania. This was the famous Supplex Libellus Valachorum. The firm but restrained document was again forwarded to the diet, where it called forth ‘a general silence’ (though on this occasion not a ‘religious’ one) ‘and great consternation’, until it was once more denounced, with the observation that the Wallachs were immature not only politically, as shiftless immigrants, but even more so culturally because of the nescience of their priests.53 After those events in the early 1790s the Serbian and Rumanian national questions reverted to dormancy for a full half-century as state concerns of the Habsburg Monarchy. As concerns of the relevant ecclesiastical communities, however, they evolved continuously, and I can only offer the rudest summary here. Of the three particularities we identified in the circumstances of these two peoples, the territorial one—the real or hoped-for separateness of the Banat or Transylvania—has already been discussed; while the place of the second, military one—the existence of Serbian and Rumanian regiments as part of the Austrian border troops—is reasonably clear in the present context.54 After 1800 the third—the foreign orientation—began swiftly to gain in significance, while at the same time its relevance for the confessional debate changed. Earlier it was primarily priests who, together with merchants, had had dealings with the Balkans or the Danubian principalities. In the background stood the Russian tsar, as self-proclaimed protector of all Orthodox communities abroad. Then came the Serbian insurrection from 1804 onwards and the Rumanian ferment from 1821; in the interim Russia’s interest in ecclesiastical politics yielded ground to the great power diplomacy of Alexander I. Beside the existing religious contacts, which with the consolidation of a native hierarchy anyway grew less vigorous, there emerged secular linkages, which tended to place the unity of the nation before that of the church. 52 Nicolae Iorga, Istoria literaturii roma ˆ nes¸ti, vol. iii (2nd edn., Buch., 1933); Ion Lungu, S¸coala ardeleana˘, mis¸care ideologica˘ nat¸ionala˘ illuminista˘ (Buch., 1978); Hitchins, L’Ideé de nation, 87–147. Cf. above, ch. 8, n. 29. 53 Prodan, Supplex Libellus Valachorum. On the dietal debates: Ferdinand von Zieglauer, Die politische Reformbewegung in Siebenbu¨rgen in der Zeit Josephs II. und Leopolds II. (V., 1881), 537 ff. 54 On the role of the Milita ¨ rgrenze in this connection: Carl Go¨llner, Die siebenbu¨rgische Milita¨rgrenze (Mun., 1974); Valeriu Sˇotropa, Districtul gra˘niceresc na˘sa˘udean (Cluj, 1975).


165

Moreover, these secularizing trends played themselves out at home too. Among the Serbs it was the extraordinary personality of Dositej Obradovic´, initially a monk and then a passionate devotee of the Enlightenment, who first challenged priestly direction over national culture. A bitter quarrel ensued over the literary language between adherents of the archaizing ‘Slaveno-Serbian’, as employed by the church, and the advocates of more populist forms of expression.55 With the expansion of Serb education, publishing, and journalism, which mostly originated in Pest and Novi Sad and spread from there to the independent principality based on Belgrade, and with the soundings which began to be taken towards some kind of cooperation with the Croats, this conflict only intensified. Suffice it to mention the name of the poet, ethnographer, and grammarian, Vuk Karadzˇic´.56 Similar tensions built up on the Rumanian side: whether in the form of insubordinate intellectuals within the priesthood, as in the case of Sˇincai already in the 1790s or of Ba˘rnut¸iu in the 1840s; or in the wake of a broader liberalization of cultural values, as in the circle of Gheorghe Barit¸iu, who operated in the comparatively progressive Saxon town of Kronstadt. Although the Rumanian educational network grew ever denser—by 1840 there were some 400 to 500 schools in Transylvania—and was centred on the two episcopal sees Blaj and Sibiu/Hermannstadt, neither the Uniate nor the Orthodox bishops sustained leadership of the nation during these decades.57 On the contrary, they felt in some degree attracted, as did many Rumanian members of the lesser nobility, by the lifestyle of the Magyars and Saxons. And confessional discord persisted, especially in the Banat, where in face of the Serbs’ ecclesiastical dominance Rumanian ethnic patriots turned to more temporal channels of persuasion. The labours of such personalities as the dissident priest and writer Dimitrie T ¸ ichindeal (a follower of Obradovic´) prepared the way for the career of the radical jurist Eftimie Murgu.

Thus we come back finally to the revolutionary years of 1848–9, at the start of which Murgu was sitting in a gaol in Pest under suspicion of hatching a conspiracy. I shall seek to gloss the ensuing tumultuous and bloody events merely as confirmation of what has hitherto been presented. After all, even Murgu’s programme was already elaborated before 1848. His activity in the revolutionary period illustrates the general intertwining of church and politics, but also the intricacy, even perversity of their relationship: for Murgu and his associates had their Serbian co-religionists in the Banat as declared foes, and they were prepared Obradovic´, Life and Adventures. Wilson, Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadzˇic´. Also W. Lukan and D. Medakovic´ (ed.), Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadzˇic´, 1787–1864: Festschrift zu seinem 200. Geburtstag (V., 1987). 57 Iorga, Istoria roma ˆ nilor, 381 ff.; Vasile Netea, Gheorghe Barit¸iu: viat¸a ¸s i activitatea sa (Buch., 1966); Hitchins, L’Ideé de nation, 148–79. 55 56

166

The Rise of Nations

if necessary, for all their autonomy plans and underlying belief in the DacoRomanian idea, to join forces with the Magyars.58 1848 saw a liberal transformation in Hungary that was broadly disadvantageous to vested ecclesiastical interests: we need think only of the abolition of tithes and the state-centred educational reforms of Eo¨tvo¨s. This naturally caused division; but the majority of the population were carried away by the changes: most Magyars, Germans, Slovaks, Ruthenes—as well as the Jews—and without distinction of religion.59 Many of those who, from hostility to reform or to government or both, actively resisted the new course or simply lay low— numerous nobles, the bulk of the Croats and Transylvanian Saxons, the Slovak grouping around Sˇtu´r—responded likewise without distinction of religion. The fact that the Croats constituted a uniformly Catholic and the Saxons a uniformly Evangelical community, has little or nothing directly to do with the matter. The exceptions, notoriously, were the Serbs and Rumanians. Here confessional considerations are unmistakable. In the sources we find many instances of Rumanian popes, both Uniate and Orthodox, who after the outbreak of the revolution incited the peasants to disobedience; whereas the threatened Hungarian regime sought to win over the peaceable canon of Blaj, Cipariu, precisely because ‘he enjoys special influence upon his nation’.60 Second among the demands of the Ba˘rnut¸iu-inspired Blaj assembly stood the freedom, autonomy, and equality of the Rumanian church (and in twelfth place the payment of all clergy from the state budget). At Sremski Karlovci the very first desideratum was the election of a patriarch (in practice promotion of the existing metropolitan, Rajacˇic´).61 Even in this case, however, we must conclude that, while religion had contributed much to the making of national feeling, the latter had already begun to surpass it. The Serbian uprising was launched with a repetition of the proceedings of 1790: a delegation appealed to the Hungarian diet for the confirmation of privileges. But under the military command of the hot-blooded young officer Djordje Stratimirovic´ the nation soon came into its own as the higher-order concept. ‘If you hold to your demands’, said Kossuth in a celebrated exchange, ‘then our swords will cross.’ ‘The Serb was never such a coward’, Stratimirovic´ is supposed to have riposted.62 After the separatist Sabor, Stratimirovic´ and Rajacˇic´ soon fell out: at one point the Patriarch set off in I.D. Suciu, Revolut¸ia de la 1848–9 ˆın Banat (Buch., 1968), esp. 86 ff. Excellent overall coverage in Istvań Dea´k, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–9 (New York, 1979); cf. Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete, 1848–90, ed E. Kovaćs (2 vols., Bp., 1979), 23–434. On the—fairly modest—achievements of the Hungarian ministry of cults and education during 1848–9, see Erzse´bet F. Kiss, Az 1848-9-es magyar miniszte´riumok (Bp., 1987), 436–59. 60 S ¸. Pascu and V. Cherestes¸iu (ed.), Revolut¸ia de la 1848–9 din Transilvania (5 vols. so far, Buch., since 1977), ii, nos. 142, 197, 244, 274; i, no. 44 ff. (Cipariu). 61 Cherestes ¸iu, Adunarea nat¸ionala˘, 459 ff. Thim, Szerb felkele´s to¨rteńete, ii, no. 105. 62 Thim, Szerb felkele ´s to¨rteńete, i. 34 ff. 58 59


167

full vestments, with crown and cross, in order to arrest the chief of his own army. In other ways too Rajacˇic´’s leadership provoked dissension: several of his bishops remained loyal to the Hungarian government; while young radicals like Svetozar Miletic´ sounded the bells of village churches in order to propagate their own secular nationalism among the people.63 For the Rumanians’ national cause the rapprochement of their two churches under the pressure of events was a development of huge significance. At the same time, however, this brought with it (as for the Slovaks) a certain dilution. If—as Iorga opined—the power of religion brought the peasants to Blaj, it was nevertheless their grievances which united them. They came, as Stephan Ludwig Roth noted, in order ‘to hear at last of their liberation from labour service’; but once assembled ‘the idea of nationality took root among them’.64 Whereas the Magyarophile Uniate bishop, Lemeńi, soon withdrew from the struggle, his younger Orthodox colleague, S¸aguna, pursued a highly conservative, Austrianorientated path, which displeased the more militant members of the movement: between him and the guerrilla leader Avram Iancu there was hardly any contact,65 and the Rumanians of the Banat steered (as we have seen) a far more liberal course. What of the dynasty in all this? Immediately after Franz Joseph’s accession to the throne in December 1848 a delegation reminded him that the Serbs had been ‘the first to take up arms against the Magyars to protect their own political existence and that of the whole Monarchy’. Certainly Rajacˇic´ and many of his supporters, particularly the frontier soldiers, were Habsburg loyalists; likewise Rumanian clerical politicians and their flocks. The Orthodox bishop of Arad explained to the peasants that ‘His Imperial and Royal Majesty’ (and not the Hungarian government) had released them from their burdens. In September thousands of Transylvanian villagers defied the Hungarian recruiting officers, since the call-up papers displayed neither imperial signature nor a double eagle; in the resultant troubles dozens lost their lives.66 In accordance with this mood the reviving Habsburg court was able to utilize, indeed exploit the Serbian and Rumanian movements (as it had previously the Croatian one) both militarily and politically. That is another story. Nevertheless imperial loyalty had little to do with our problem. Habsburg attitudes to the intellectual world of the Orthodox, even of the Greek-Catholics, had always been ambivalent. By the same token a cosmopolitan figure from that background, like S¸aguna, who nearly felt himself Austrian and used German more or less as his mother-tongue, was always a rarity; and the admiration for the 63 Ibid., i. 221 ff. (Stratimirovic ´), i. 46 ff., ii, nos. 38, 43 (Miletic´); Georg Stratimirovic´, Was ich erlebte (V./Leipzig, 1911). 64 Iorga, Istoria roma ˆ nilor, 411 ff.; Roth cited in Bodea, 1848 la romaˆni, i, no. 120. 65 Iorga, Istoria roma ˆ nilor, 440; on S¸aguna, ibid., 411 ff.; Keith Hitchins, Orthodoxy and Nationality: Andreiu S¸aguna and the Rumanians of Transylvania, 1846–73 (Camb. Mass., 1977). 66 Thim, Szerb felkele ´s to¨rteńete, iii. 233 (italics mine); Pascu and Cherestes¸iu, Revolut¸ia, ii., no. 180; Bodea, 1848 la romaˆni, ii., nos. 272–3.

168

The Rise of Nations

emperorship on the part of Uniate intellectuals—as a Roman heritage—hardly had practical implications. Yet precisely on this terrain an epilogue was played out, once almost all the hopes of the various revolutionary or counter-revolutionary national campaigns of 1848–9 had turned to dust. For in response to them the Habsburgs now deployed only ecclesiastical politics. In the decade of the Concordat with the Holy See they endeavoured to satisfy ethnic claims within the Monarchy through measures of a merely confessional kind. The Croats garnered an archbishopric in Zagreb; the Uniates gained metropolitan status for Blaj; so, a little later, did S¸aguna for the Rumanian Orthodox (Rajacˇic´’s rank as patriarch had already been confirmed in 1849). Even for the Protestants of Hungary a reorganization was proposed which would have enhanced the influence of German and Slovak elements among them.67 All that, although not entirely without lasting consequence, no longer corresponded to the expectations of national communities in Central Europe. In these fast evolving societies secularized elites now played the commanding role. Moreover, the contest on a pan-monarchical level had already before 1848 begun to aggravate Hungary’s domestic conflicts, which anyhow proved increasingly intractable: the time was past for a basically apolitical solution, on Welsh lines. However, such a protracted hegemony of the values of a confessional culture could not fail to leave its mark in the contours of the new landscape. After the outbreak of civil war, inherited religious symbols and preconceptions were bound to affect the nature and exacerbate the extent of the resultant violence. That was to be expected particularly on the line of collision between—in the church-history sense—occidental and oriental peoples. Yet it seems to me that the ferocity of the hostilities in the east and south-east of the country was largely the result of other factors which have been instanced here: long-nursed, convoluted territorial claims (especially those for a new or old-new crownland of Vojvodina or Transylvania); the physical and mental preparedness for the fight on the Military Frontier; foreign provocation (in the Serbian case extending even to armed assistance), and the concomitant counter-measures taken by the Habsburgs and the Hungarian regime. Undoubtedly the well-established faultline, running from north to south roughly along the Danube, which divided Hungary into two halves for certain purposes, played some part; but it should not be exaggerated: if the Rumanians reacted to their situation as the most wretched of the country’s nationalities, the Serbs were perhaps on average the most affluent (the Magyars not excluded). Besides, so far as law and order are 67 Lajos Luka ćs, The Vatican and Hungary, 1846–78: Reports and Correspondence on Hungary of the Apostolic Nuncios in Vienna (Bp., 1981); I. Dumitriu-Snagov, Le Saint-Sie`ge et la Roumanie moderne, 1850–66 (Rome, 1982); A´gnes Dea´k, ‘Nemzeti egyenjogu´sı´ta´s’: Kormańyzati nemzetise´gpolitika Magyarorsza´gon, 1849–60 (Bp., 2000), 227 ff. On the Protestants: Friedrich Gottas, Die Frage der Protestanten in Ungarn in der A¨ra des Neoabsolutismus (Mun., 1965). Cf. below, ch.15, n. 41 etc.


169

concerned, the most notorious brigands and bandits (the betya´rs) operated in the west and centre of Hungary—and above all in the supposedly tranquillized 1850s. A full explanation would naturally need to draw on the great transformations which were in any event under way in the earlier nineteenth century, as the political revolution in France and the industrial revolution in Great Britain brought fresh forms of society to birth across all Europe. That is especially so for a land like Hungary, on the periphery of Enlightenment and liberalism, at the turning point between traditional kinds of group behaviour and modern ideology. To such traditions religion pre-eminently belonged. Whether the Hungarian civil war of 1848–9 in this respect is therefore to be accounted the first of the Balkan wars, I must leave for others to determine.68 68 It is well beyond the purpose of this essay to draw such connections, but see the recent important article by Mark Biondich, in SEER, 83 (2005), 71–116, on how far the most murderous of all twentieth-century movements in that region, the Croatian Ustasˇa, really had a religious agenda (not much).


PART III REGIONS AND THEIR INTERPLAY


10 The Habsburgs and the Hungarian Problem, 1790–1848 Given the perilous unrest of 1790 and the revolutionary situation of 1848, together with several serious political clashes in the intervening decades, there could be no doubt that the Habsburgs faced their most chronic problems in Hungary. These are the episodes upon which historiography has concentrated. Yet for most of the time Habsburg rule there was stable enough, during both the era of the Napoleonic wars and the age of Metternich, and and we can find considerable evidence of a concerted purpose. This essay seeks to explain that state of affairs by focusing especially on the neglected figures—cultural brokers or administrative middlemen—who mediated between Austria and Hungary, and on the areas of common policy between government and opposition. Against that background it re-examines the events which led to 1848 as a clear failure of the established mechanisms for compromise. The real source of our troubles lies in the governmental system. . . . There are political arrangements which, by virtue of their permanence, do not gain, but rather lose strength, till at length the moment is reached . . . when their long life qualifies them only to be allowed to die.1

When he addressed assembled members of the Hungarian diet on 3 March 1848, the popular tribune, Lajos Kossuth, did not mince words. Although his tongue was loosed by news of the fall of the monarchy in France, and by the fact that he was addressing a private session, Kossuth’s devastating criticisms of the country’s rulers formed the culmination of a campaign of agitation which stretched back a decade and more. He called for a constitutional transformation, with a responsible ministry, full legal equality, and the abolition of all privilege. The following month, with the so-called April Laws, Kossuth’s programme was conceded wholesale by the authorities, under pressure from the sans-culottes of Buda-Pest, and prostrate before their own Viennese revolution—for his speech had played a major part in unseating Metternich there. Six months later power passed to a fully secessionist Hungarian regime, in which Kossuth enjoyed Originally printed in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 39 (1989), 41–62. 1 The whole speech in Kossuth, Ira ´ sok és besze´dek 1848–9-bo˝l, ed. T. Katona (Bp., 1987), 12– 26, quoted at 19.

174

Regions and their Interplay

near-dictatorial sway. The ensuing civil war, during which the dynasty was declared deposed, took a further year to contain; its outcome appeared to be a complete breakdown of mutual confidence between king and country.2 Those with long memories in 1848 could recall a constitutional crisis of similar dimensions, albeit with a less bloody outcome. In early March 1790, news had just been received of the death of Joseph II, who had ruled Hungary as an authentic enlightened despot. A wave of anti-Habsburg emotion led to the systematic burning of Joseph’s decrees, then to plotting with Prussian diplomats. The bizarre project was even mooted of placing Karl August of Weimar on the Hungarian throne—presumably with Goethe as his adviser.3 Again, desperate government measures, this time to forestall rather than to undo revolution, included brutal action against the radical opposition: the ‘Jacobin’ trials and executions of 1794–5 had repercussions throughout the political nation.4 There is no doubt, then, that the Habsburgs had a ‘Hungarian problem’. On the one hand, Hungary, with her loosely associated territories of Croatia and Transylvania, was structurally different from the rest of their realms, especially since more coherent policies of centralization and consolidation had begun to be implemented by the dynasty from the 1740s. An empire originally brought together on the basis of oligarchy and Catholic culture was turning into an empire regulated by new institutions and precepts which seemed perforce to stop short at the river Leitha, leaving a diet, local administration, distinct legal system, and stagnant agrarian economy behind Hungary’s separate customs frontier. De jure, and often de facto most features of a ‘dualism’ between two halves of the same polity already stood in place. On the other hand, however, such dualism sat uneasily—as it was to do until the very end of the Monarchy—with the broader implications of government policy, particularly with the evolution of a unitary means of defence, that raison d’eˆtre of the Gesamtstaat, the totality of the Habsburg lands, as enunciated in the Pragmatic Sanction. The single Austrian army, containing Hungarian regiments within it since 1715, and liaising with Hungarian auxiliary forces outside it, paid no heed to any separate claims of the crown of St Stephen in its organization or operations, and as little as possible in matters of recruitment and financial provision.5 It was the Habsburgs’ bad luck that their most ungovernable realm also nursed the deepest sense of grievance. 2 Convenient summaries of these events in Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete, 1848–90, ed. Kovaćs, ii. 61 ff. (by Gyo¨rgy Spira); and, in English, in Dea´k, Lawful Revolution. Brief sketch, with bibliography, of the overall situation in the Monarchy by R. J. W. Evans in Revolutions in Europe, ed. Evans and Pogge von Strandmann, 181–206. 3 Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s, passim; Robert Gragger, Preuben, Weimar und die ungarische Ko¨nigskrone (Berlin/Leipzig, 1923). A British candidature was also mooted: Szaka´ly, Egy va´llalkozo´ fo˝nemes, 107–37. 4 Convenient summaries in Magyarorsza ´ g to¨rteńete, 1790–1848, ed. Gy. Me´rei (2 vols., Bp., 1980), i. 159–212 (by Ka´lmań Benda); and, in English, in Wangermann, Jacobin Trials, esp. 109 ff. 5 Gunther E. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (L., 1982). Cf. important studies of the subsequent period: id., The Army of

The Habsburgs and the Hungarian Problem

175

Yet in fact the whole long period between 1790 and 1848 was characterized by a relationship between Hungary and her rulers far more pacific than the events of those terminal years would seem to imply. Eighteenth-century modernization programmes did not lack support in Hungary; nor did the conservative monarchism inspired by experience of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.6 The Habsburgs provided, not only the bugbear of an absent ruler, but three widely admired and respected Palatines (viceroys)—one of them, Joseph, serving over fifty years in the office. The diet proved a focus, not only for discontent, but also for a series of grand reconciliations. The first of these, presided over by Palatine Alexander Leopold, took place in the early 1790s, when reform commissions of the diet (so-called regnicolar deputations) hammered out proposals more harmonious and ‘Josephinist’ in spirit for the fact that the pressure of Joseph’s personality had been removed, and the nobility greeted the French war with fervent declarations reminiscent of their vitam et sanguinem pledge to the young Maria Theresa.7 From 1794 there was indeed a hiatus, with the panic, initiated by the Palatine, about a Jacobin conspiracy, and then some hard bargaining over the army. In 1805 the diet forced concessions, with the French at the gates of Vienna; two years later it raised a storm about economic issues: but by 1808 all was sweetness and light again, and in 1809 the time-honoured Hungarian leveé en masse trundled out to defy Napoleon’s blitzkrieg. Over the next fifteen years the same peripateia: a unilateral devaluation of the currency by the Emperor-King revived clamorous expressions of grievance, which were compounded when Francis I added to his stony inflexibility further demands, of dubious constitutional status, for recruits and taxation. But coordinated resistance and the promptings of Palatine Joseph persuaded the ruler to reconvene the diet and come to terms with the opposition.8 This diet of 1825–7, besides being a very important exercise in mending fences, also generated fresh tensions, as a campaign for reform began to emerge, concerted by publication of the reports of the regnicolar deputations, which had been gathering dust since the 1790s. The programme of material transformation and spiritual renewal associated with Istvań Szećhenyi soon gave rise to more ¨ sterreich: Francis Joseph (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1976); Antonio Schmidt-Brentano, Die Armee in O Milita¨r, Staat und Gesellschaft, 1848–67 (Boppard a.R., 1975); Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, vol. v. For Vorma¨rz grievances about the army, cf. Andra´s Molna´r in Sz. 133 (1999), 1193–215. 6 Major reappraisal of the eighteenth-century evidence in Kosa ´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, and E´va H. Bala´zs, Hungary and the Habsburgs. 7 In general Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s; Miha´ly Horva´th, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme, vol. viii (Bp., 1873), 129 ff., 199 ff. Cf. the argument of Eleme´r Ma´lyusz in the introduction to his Sańdor Lipo´t, esp. 137–41. Graphic description of the renewed pledge in Orsza´gos Leve´lta´r (National Archives, Bp., hereafter ‘OL’), P 1765, csomo´ 86, nos. 9850 seqq. 8 Ma ´lyusz, Sańdor Lipo´t, esp. 172 ff., for 1794–5. Sańdor Domanovszky, Jo´zsef na´dor élete (2 vols., Bp., 1944), for the next period, complementing Ede Wertheimer, Ausztria és Magyarorsza´g a tizenkilencedik sza´zad elso´´ tizede´ben (2 vols., Bp., 1890–2), and Horva´th, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme. Still fundamental for the early 1820s: Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 3–134.

176


advanced social and political demands. The authorities’ first response was again tough, and included imprisonment for the rising Kossuth; but then the fifteenyear cycle repeated itself, with the Palatine once more prominent, and the diet of 1840 seemed to achieve a substantial reconciliation. During the next decade antagonisms revived, in measurably more hectic forms, with the growth of a primitive style of party politics; the liberal opposition called for a total abolishment of noble privilege. Yet even the initial stages of the 1848 crisis display significant elements of compromise, under the patronage of the young Palatine Stephen; and the April Laws were passed by the diet in traditional form. They ushered in a ministry of all the talents under Count Lajos Batthyańy, whose actions were designed in part to head off the prospect of extremer movements, like the radicalism of Buda-Pest.9 I shall return later to the question why the old bottle proved unable to hold new wine. But how had it been tough or capacious enough to endure so long? One answer lies in an issue whose denouement exactly spanned the decades from the 1790s to 1840s: for besides the accommodation of basically backwardlooking material grievance couched in oppositional ideology, one crucial item of forward ideology with material implications had its place in the scheme of semi-ritualized alternate confrontation and pacification. This was the issue of language. Voices were raised from the 1780s for Magyar as the national or mother tongue of Hungary. They constituted a reaction against Joseph II’s notorious imposition of German, but also a fruit of Enlightenment interest in the vernaculars and of new literary enthusiasm.10 The pressure of writers like Ferenc Kazinczy helped elicit a first paper provision for Magyar, mainly as a subject in schools, by the compromise package of 1792. After further government concessions the language came into widespread voluntary use from 1805. After 1830 it was made compulsory in much of the public service, besides exerting its impact through the young Academy of Sciences, whose statutes received royal sanction the following year. Between 1836 and 1845 Magyar became the language of constitutional record and dietal proceedings, while Latin was eliminated in education, its other remaining bastion.11 Four comments can readily be made about these measures. First, they were achieved by ordered transaction between Habsburgs and nation, after the crisis of 1790 and before that of 1848. Secondly, they acted thereby as a safety-valve in relations between court and country, indeed in some respects they signified a retreat of the latter from explicitly political activity (Kazinczy is a good exemplar 9 For 1848 in its historical context see, besides the works cited above, n. 2, the classic account by Horva´th in Huszono¨t év, ii. 567 ff., and in Magyarorsza´g fu¨ggetlense´gi harcańak to¨rteńete 1848 és 1849-ben (3 vols., Pest, 1871–2); and the important treatment by Alada´r Urbań, Batthyańy Lajos miniszterelno¨kse´ge (Bp., 1986). 10 Rapant, K poc ˇiatkom mad’arizaćie, i (for background) and ii (for 1790–2); cf. above, ch. 8. 11 Full discussion and documentation in Gy. Szekfu ˝ (ed.), Iratok a magyar a´llamnyelv ke´rde´seńek to¨rteńete´hez, 1790–1848 (Bp., 1926).


177

of such a surrogate function). Yet, thirdly, they yielded from the very beginning friction inside Hungary with other nationalities (or, more precisely, with those citizens who set store by other languages and cultures); and the qualified but stubborn resistance to them from Vienna in some measure foresaw, without (so far as I can judge) welcoming, those longer-term disruptive effects.12 Fourthly, the advance of Magyar heightened the distinctiveness, and especially the perceived distinctiveness, of the dominant element in Hungary vis-a`-vis the rest of the Monarchy: in that way too, it built up trouble for the future. One final, broader point, however, most concerns me here. Language, with all the national issues which it embodied, was also an administrative matter: not so much a crude question of jobs, since, objectively speaking, the traditional usage of Latin formed almost as effective a barrier against the outside world as Magyar; but a whole set of relations, internal and external, of executive authority, the more so given the rapid spread of the written word in this period. Elsewhere in the Monarchy, in the later nineteenth century, that would be obvious. In Hungary, before 1848, it may surprise, given the persuasion, common to many contemporaries as to historians, that Hungary was distinguished by an absence of bureaucracy.13 Horsemanship, political rhetoric, hospitality, chronic indebtedness, rustic pursuits, maybe even cultural patronage: all these, and a little JP work, might detain her nobility; but not state service. Yet Hungary did have an administration—not just in her counties (which I shall touch on shortly), but, superior and logically prior to them, in royal agencies with extensive authority under the constitution. Moreover this central administration, I propose to argue, represented the main force for lasting stability in the country’s relations with her Habsburg rulers.

Hungary had some 4,300 appointed royal officials in 1840, nearly 1,000 of them in three central institutions.14 The Chancellery, headed by a Cancellarius, played an advisory and mediatory role in the various divisions of business—taxes, peasant questions, military supply, trade, communications, religion, charities, education, medicine, etc.—which passed between Vienna, where it was located, and the country.15 Chief executive powers inside Hungary rested with the 12 I have found no evidence in Szekfu ˝’s collection (Iratok), or elsewhere, of any governmental policy to favour the language laws in the hope of profiting from their divisive effects; rather there are dire predictions of their likely result. But more work would be necessary to confirm the negative hypothesis. For disruptive effects in the ecclesiastical sphere, see ch. 9 above. 13 Kossuth’s comments, in his speech of 3 March 1848 (above, n. 1) are typical in identifying bureaucrats as an emanation from Vienna: ‘a bećsi bu¨rokratikus kormańyrendszer . . . a bećsi rendszer csontkamara´ja´bo´l egy sorvaszto´ sze´l fu´j reańk . . . a bu¨rokratikus mozdulatlansa´g ama politika´ja, mely a bećsi sta´tustanaćsban megcsontosodott . . . bu¨ro e´s bajonett nyomoru´ kapocs . . . ’ 14 Elek Fe ńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja (3 vols., Pest, 1842–3), i. 113 f. Cf. Schematismus inclyti regni Hungariae partiumque eidem annexarum pro anno 1839 (Buda, 1839), 97 ff. 15 There is no history of the Chancellery; but cf. Fe ńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja, ii. 119–24, and earlier Miha´ly Horva´th [not the historian], Statistica regni Hungariae et partium eidem

178


Lieutenancy Council, under the Palatine, which received directives (rescripta, decreta) from the king, issued mandates (normalia) to the localities, and possessed, like the Chancellery, a lively tradition of comment and remonstrance. The Chamber, under its President, managed the fiscal and economic interests of the crown.16 There were, besides, high legal officers—Chief Justice ( Judex Curiae), Personalis, and judges of the Royal Curia—whose functions overlapped closely with those of the executive branch. Indeed, one crucial qualification for senior posts in the administration was a training in Hungarian law. The other was linguistic competence, in Latin, German, and Magyar. By the early nineteenth century we find some evidence of formal preparation and competitive appointment, a structure of (mostly modest) salaries, with certain pension rights, and what appears a largely diligent response from an understaffed cadre (above all in the law courts) to the mounting volume of business. Its bureaucratic procedures evidently borrowed heavily from Austrian models,17 but its recruitment was quite distinct: this service remained in its upper echelons overwhelmingly Hungarian—with the Chancellery as a quasidiplomatic enclave in the Habsburg capital—and noble. The fact that some foreign experts might be infiltrated, especially into the Chamber, and that some capable commoners might be ennobled to climb the career ladder, did not— I think—alter its basic ethos. Two important riders need also to be entered. The administration, while Hungarian in background, was not necessarily Magyar. It contained goodly numbers of Germans and Croats, who with few exceptions did not associate themselves with Austrian sentiments where those might clash with Hungarian ones. At the top, Palatine Joseph set an example in hard-working defence of the interests of his adopted country: although dispensed ad hominem from the language decrees, he became surely the last secular governor anywhere whose patriotism was measured by the excellence of his Latin.18 The corollary is that, like Joseph, government servants proved much slower than the opposition to make the great transition from amor patriae in its traditional territorial context to linguistic nationalism: not that many were altogether impervious to the latter as time went on; but private sympathies would be moderated by professional priorities. Moreover the administration, while noble in background, was not adnexarum (Pozsony, 1802), pt. 3. Brief accounts of the administrative background by George Barany, in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, ii. 306 ff.; and in Andor Csizmadia, A magyar ko¨zigazgata´s fejlo˝de´se, 65 ff.; cf. above, ch. 2, in some ways a companion essay to this one. 16 On the Council, faute de mieux: Fe ńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja, ii. 124–8; I. Felho˝ and A. Vo¨ro¨s (comp.), A helytarto´tanaćsi leve´lta´r (Bp., 1961). On the Chamber: Nagy, Magyar kamara, 288 ff.; cf. Feńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja, iii. 33 ff. 17 For which see Karl Megner, Beamte: Wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte des k.k. Beamtentums (V., 1985); Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen. 18 General characterization in Domanovszky, Jo ´zsef na´dor élete. Contemporary tributes by Ferenc Kazinczy, Mu˝vei, ed. M. Szauder (2 vols., Bp., 1979), ii. no. 215; Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 419–23.


179

necessarily conservative. Mildly reformist endeavours might be stunted by the experience of 1795, when certain progressive officials were dismissed. Yet—as elsewhere in the Monarchy—they lived on, fortified in Hungary by the rising proportion of Protestants who could now enter the service. The crucial brokerage function of these administrators was exercised partly at the diet, where leading royal servants attended either ex officio or by virtue of their social status; but mainly through control of affairs, personal contacts, and networks of influence. Prominent members of the opposition could regularly be won over—an early case is that of Pe´ter Balogh at the beginning of the 1790s— a practice which, in the hands of such as Ludwig Wirkner in the 1830s and 1840s, has frequently, but perhaps over-excitedly, been condemned as subornation.19 The real continuity, however, was assured by familial lineages within the bureaucracy. What sort of people are we dealing with here? Let me flesh out the general impressions with a few particulars. Some belonged to the old aristocracy, among them the two senior royal officials at the start of our period. The Chancellor in 1790 was Ka´roly Pa´lffy, member of an arch-aulic family, but with a base of considerable popularity in the country. His father had served in the same post before him, till dropped for insubordination; his nephew would do so again in the 1830s.20 Chief Justice in 1790 was the still young, zealous, and malleable Ka´roly Zıćhy, a very effective mediator who, dismissed for a time after 1795, returned with an Austrian governmental post; his son, another Ka´roly, became President of the Chamber.21 The Zıćhys provide a classic example of bureaucratized magnates, who can hardly have joined the administration for money— the representative side certainly seems to have run them and the Pa´lffys into debt in the 1790s, even though some sinecures may have lain within their grasp22— and who, often ensconced in Vienna, nevertheless usually remained, in some fundamental sense, Hungarians. A more significant grouping, since most traditional aristocrats did not have a regular link with the professional administration, is the new aristocracy: a handful of families raised to great influence through their ambitious response to the fresh official opportunities opened up under Maria Theresa and Joseph II. 19 Examples in Horva ´th, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme, 248 f.; id., Huszono¨t év, i. 130, 228, 285 f.; cf. Sańdor Taka´ts, Ke´mvila´g Magyarorsza´gon (2nd edn., Bp., 1980). Wirkner defends his actions in Meine Erlebnisse: Bla¨tter aus dem Tagebuche meines o¨ffentlichen Wirkens vom Jahre 1825 bis 1852 (Pressburg, 1879), 69 ff., 129 ff. 20 Much of the personal information in these paragraphs rests on general compendia, especially Nagy, Magyarorsza´g csala´dai; Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon; and Szinnyei, Magyar ´ıro´k. Sometimes the information is discrepant. More recent sources add little. On Pa´lffy see also Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza´ggyu˝le´s, 59 f. 21 Ibid. 60 f.; Wertheimer, Ausztria ´ es Magyarorsza´g, ii. 17 f. and passim (a negative view); Ma´lyusz, Sańdor Lipo´t, 26 f. and passim; I. Bakaćs (comp.), A Zıćhy csala´d leve´lta´ra (Bp., 1963). 22 Debts: OL P 708, ku ´ tfo˝ 21, folder 3, fos. 21 f.; cf. Giuseppe Felloni, Gli investimenti finanziari genovesi in Europa tra il Seicento e la Restaurazione (Milan, 1971), app. 3. Sinecures: Ma´lyusz, Sańdor Lipo´t, 508 n.

180


We have another classic case in the Maila´ths, the brothers Jo´zsef and Gyo¨rgy and their progeny, who held high financial, legal, and chancellery posts through three generations, culminating in simultaneous service as Cancellarius and Judex Curiae during the 1840s. The values they espoused found expression in the writings of almost the only Maila´th who did not accept public office: Jańos (Johann), loyalist historian of the Habsburg Monarchy, but also an enthusiast for Hungarian legends and folklore, who impoverished himself in support of the Academy and other cultural purposes.23 The Croatian Szećsens gained prominence at much the same time, through Sańdor, President of the Chamber for eighteen years from 1790. His son and grandson followed him in the service, as did successive generations of their fellow-countrymen, the Bedekoviches. Such recently established families shade into a further subgroup of those which rose in just the decades under consideration to assume a major part in running Hungary. Here again we encounter first two personalities who, having served Joseph II with considerable loyalty but markedly declining enthusiasm as he rode roughshod over the constitution, were largely instrumental in picking ¨ rmeńyi, the Personalis, had been the chief up the pieces after his death. Jo´zsef U architect of Hungary’s educational reform. Although dismissed like Zıćhy in 1795, he soon returned as Chief Justice, retaining his influence into the 1820s, and his son acted as long-time governor of Fiume, Hungary’s only port.24 ¨ rmeńyi in the effective campaign to reconcile the country with its Alongside U ruler stood his prote´ge´, Sańdor Pa´szthory, son of a judge from the middling nobility. Under Joseph, Pa´szthory had become the brains of the Chancellery (as well as Hungarian representative on the Educational Commission in Vienna); then he too was governor of Fiume until his early death in 1798.25 Pa´szthory was an outstanding public servant. His papers suggest fluency in six languages (including English); yet he reckoned Magyar not least of them, and it was Pa´szthory who persuaded Joseph to his historic decree of December 1789 which for the first time summoned the diet in Hungarian as well as Latin. His cosmopolitanism, Freemasonry, and interest in foreign constitutional models clearly helped him in his shrewd management of the unruly diet proceedings of 1790.26 At Fiume Pa´szthory took on a promising clerk who later married his daughter and pursued a similar career in the next generation: Zsigmond 23 Johann [Ja ńos] Maila´th, Geschichte des o¨streichischen Kaiserstaates (5 vols., Hamburg, 1834–50); Zsigmond Va´rady, Grof Maila´th Jańos szerepe a magyar irodalomban (Ma´ramarossziget, 1911); Kazinczy, Mu˝vei, ii, nos. 161, 229. There is much passim on Gyo¨rgy and Antal Maila´th in the literature on the 1840s cited below. 24 Kosa ´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 388 f., 410 ff. passim; Ma´lyusz, Sańdor Lipo´t, passim, for his earlier career. Sańdor Domanovszky (ed.), Jo´zsef na´dor iratai, vol. i (Bp., 1925), covers the 1795 episode. 25 This account of Pa ´szthory rests on his papers in OL P 643, csomo´ 30; on Kosa´ry, Mu˝velo˝de´s, 327, 390, 444–5, 465, 473; and on the scattered references in Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza´ggyu˝le´s, and in Hajdu, II. Jo´zsef igazgata´si reformjai, esp. 103 ff. 26 For Pa ´szthory’s English: OL P 643, csomo´ 30, fos. 312 f.; Lajos Hajdu, A ko¨zjo´ szolga´lata´ban (Bp., 1983), 96, 309. For the language decree: Szekfu˝ (ed.), Iratok, 34 ff. Freemasonry: OL, loc. cit. fos. 315 ff. See also the verdict of Kazinczy, Mu˝vei, i. 272 f.


181

Szo˝gyeńy became successively fiscal official in Pest, youngest assessor on the Tabula Regia, financial administrator in Vienna, and Personalis back in Hungary. The Szo˝gyeńys were a semi-loyalist family: the grandfather had served over twenty years in the Lieutenancy Council, but the father stayed in the provinces, and his letters to Zsigmond afford a fascinating glimpse into the play of conflicting pressures. ‘From all this [the changes of 1795], dear son, you can learn what a great vanity it is to crave for office; how much better to follow the advice of the ancient sages. . . . A tranquil heart makes for happiness, not fine rank or riches.’ And he pleads that Zsigmond observe Hungarian manners, and wear the broad cloak or ko¨nto¨s, rather than the sort of attire ‘which makes Magyars vomit’.27 We must hope the elder Szo˝gyeńy was not too disappointed: Zsigmond advanced to a salary of 6,000 gulden per annum (having begun at 100), with a pension for the widow after his death from overwork in 1826; but his love for his native language seems to have survived, along with a key role as honest broker with Vienna during the early 1820s. The third generation, La´szlo´ Szo˝gyeńy, was Vice-Chancellor of the realm on the eve of 1848, and entered the titled nobility.28 From a third level of more workaday figures we may again take two examples. Jańos Somogyi came from middling circumstances, through an unsavoury task as royal prosecutor in the 1790s, to act as Hungarian adviser on the Staatsrat, the highest deliberative body in the Monarchy. But he was no Austrian myrmidon: even Kazinczy, on whom he pronounced a death sentence (later commuted), testifies to that.29 The survival of some of his dossiers from the 1800s shows his involvement in all manner of major decisions affecting Hungary, and his evident closeness to the Emperor, who tended to accept his opinion. Somogyi’s influence extended from the diet and the noble leveé to the most senior individual appointments, especially perhaps in the church.30 Dańiel Ka´szonyi, of similar background, did not rise so high: he stuck at a chancellery secretaryship, followed by a district fiscal post. Touched by the Enlightenment in youth, he grew more conservative and somewhat snobbish later, but retained broad cultural interests. Through his papers we can penetrate further into the hybrid milieu of the new Hungarian bureaucrat and his semi-Magyar and semi-German, part urban and part landed meńage.31 27 Szo˝gye ńy’s papers are in OL P 643, csomo´ 29, including (te´tel 8) the anonymous Szo˝gyeńy Zsigmond . . . élet-rajza (Pest, 1828); details about his family ibid., te´tel 1, fo. 35; letters from his father ibid., te´tel 10, fos. 3, 5, 12, 14, 21, 23. 28 OL loc. cit. te ´tel 4, fos. 47, 16–15; te´tel 6 (salary). Kazinczy, Mu˝vei, ii, no. 179 (patriotism). Correspondence with Metternich and Stadion, OL loc. cit. te´tel 9, esp. fos. 93 ff., 151 ff.; te´tel l0, fos. 35–63. La´szlo´ Szo˝gyeńy-Marich, Emle´kiratai (3 vols., Bp., 1903–18), i. 29 Hock and Bidermann, Staatsrat, 651; Kazinczy, Mu ˝vei, i. 427 ff, esp. 438, 450; Wertheimer, Ausztria és Magyarorsza´g, ii. 34 (a negative view). 30 The dossiers are in OL P 971; cf. Kazinczy, Mu ˝vei, i. 580. 31 These papers are in OL P 1975. They have an intrinsic interest which I hope to be able to exploit more fully elsewhere.

182


We can only speculate why men like Somogyi and Ka´szonyi joined the service. The proliferation of marginal landowners, particularly in the north and west of Hungary, may have played its part; but so must the attractions of a more exciting life than that in the average manor-house—where Theresa Ka´szonyi would hardly have taken up flute, clarinet, and cello. There were certainly compensations for the hard-pressed chancellery registrar Zmeskall, another prote´ge´ of Pa´szthory, who became one of Beethoven’s intimate friends (and dedicatee of one of his most challenging string quartets).32 We may recall, in the same context, that some of the composer’s closest aristocratic patrons were the descendants of Maria Theresa’s Hungarian bureaucrat and counsellor, Count Brunswick.

This royal executive—whose systematic study is long overdue—created the polarity that, in the first instance, split the political life of Hungary. Members of the historic noble nation either belonged to it, in modest but increasing numbers, or they did not. The opposition, formed essentially by negative reference to it, objected to this ‘foreign’ growth; proclaimed its own ‘liberties’ with ever more libertarian trappings; represented bureaucracy as the principal impediment to national progress and its officers as ‘brahmins’. Many argued like the elder Szo˝gyeńy and tried to bind their diet deputies not to accept any royal post for a specified period of years.33 Yet the stronghold of the opposition also lay in administration, at the level of the counties. The power of these ‘fifty-two republics’ resided, on the one hand, in their right to send representatives to the Lower House of the diet; but on the other, precisely in their cheap, amateur, and elective functionaries who oversaw a growing number of local activities. By 1840 there were 6,000 county employees, often operating in new buildings designed for the purpose. Moreover, from 1805, they became the focus for policies of Magyarization, as county after county resolved on a vigorous assertion of its right to conduct affairs in the native language.34 We have, then, the setting for a protracted contest between Hungarian crown and Hungarian country, waged through the period with intermittent ferocity and passion. Ostensibly the constitutional struggle concerned the diet: a magnateclerical Upper House, with its dissident minority, versus a gentry-dominated 32 Mentions of music in Ka ´szonyi’s accounts, OL loc. cit. fos. 275–86. Ka´roly Vo¨ro¨s, ‘Zmeska´ll Miklo´s udvari titka´r e´lete e´s pa´lyafuta´sa’, Leve´lta´ri Ko¨zlemeńyek, 44–5 (1974), 615–31. The quartet in question is that in F minor, opus 95. 33 Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 307–11, ii. 492 f.; La´szlo´ Re´ve´sz, Die Anfa¨nge des ungarischen Parlamentarismus (Mun., 1968), 48 ff. 34 Fe ńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja, i. 113 f., ii. 128 ff. (numbers and tasks). The buildings are described in Gyula Antalffy, Reformkori magyar va´rosrajzok (Bp., 1982), passim. Much evidence of Magyarizing intent in Daniel Rapant, Ilega´lna mad’arizaćia, 1790–1840 (Turcˇiansky Sva¨ty´ Martin, 1947), though the results were not always commensurate: cf. Szekfu˝ (ed.), Iratok, 133 ff., 170 ff.; Zsigmond Kemeńy, Va´ltozatok a to¨rteńelemre, ed. Gy. To´th (Bp., 1982), 504.


183

Commons, with its considerable proportion of loyalists. But at a deeper level it was a battle between the two administrations. The crown sought to implement its will from above; country parlementaires to frustrate it, by remonstrance, fortified with the vital element of inter-county correspondence, by mandating their delegates (with the sanction of recall if they exceeded instructions), and by unofficial pre-dietal sessions—like that which Kossuth addressed on 3 March 1848. The opposition sought to promote reforms from below, in a fashion which the central authorities branded as insubordinate and anarchic.35 The strategy of high officials from one generation to the next was to turn the resultant impasse. They had a point d’appui in the shrievalty of each county, a nominated post to which the king could appoint from the ranks of reasonably docile magnates, or select in lieu a so-called administrator from among his career bureaucrats. Pa´szthory and others prepared a detailed blueprint for Joseph II on ways to gradually purge the constitution of its voluntaristic excesses, with strong men to deploy the full powers of the sheriff and engineer favourable elections to a suitably managed diet. These plans were refurbished in the early 1790s, and contemplated again in the years after 1800. Much the same course was attempted during the early 1820s, when Szo˝gyeńy figured prominently.36 It was the government’s Hungarian advisers who experimented with counting rather than weighing votes in the local assemblies; who backed the summoning of a diet and a return to the work of the old regnicolar deputations; who saw to the installation of a popular Chancellor in the self-made and honourable Revitzky. By the 1840s county elections and proceedings became tumultuous and sometimes violent, with each side blaming the other. Now the regime once more reverted to expedients strikingly similar to those first tabled in the 1780s: the energetic young Vice-Chancellor Apponyi, supported by the Maila´ths and Wirkner, sponsored official lobbying and attempts to split the opposition in the localities, and undertook a more concerted drive to impose well-paid administrators on the recalcitrant county organizations.37 The point is that these inter-Hungarian disputes concerned means rather than ends. In fact we find substantial overlap in the actual policies formulated. Both 35 In general, and on mandates: Re ´ve´sz, Anfa¨nge. On instructions: Alajos Degre´, ‘Zala megye reformkori ko¨vetutası´ta´sai’, Leve´lta´ri Ko¨zlemeńyek, 44–5 (1974), 143–60. On the unofficial meetings (keru¨leti u¨le´sek): Taka´ts, Ke´mvila´g, 150 ff.; Ka´roly Kecskeme´ti, ‘La Seánce circulaire de la die`te hongroise a` la fin de l’ancien re´gime’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 6 (1986), 135–47. 36 1780s: Hajdu, II. Jo ´zsef igazgata´si reformjai, 103 ff. Early 1790s: OL P 643, csomo´ 30, fos. 310 f., 413 f., 451–3. 1800s: Wertheimer, Ausztria és Magyarorsza´g, ii. 75 ff. 1820s: Szo˝gyeńy papers as above, n. 27; Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 24 ff.; Horst Haselsteiner, ‘Herrscherrecht und Konstitutionalismus in Ungarn: der Widerstand des Komitates Abau´j gegen das Rekrutier¨ sterreichische Osthefte, 17 (1975), 233–40. ungsdekret von Ko¨nig Franz vom 4.4.1821’, O 37 For the violence: Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 3 ff., 178 ff., etc.; Re´ve´sz, Anfa¨nge, 120 ff. For the modus operandi (though they leave crucial questions unanswered): Jańos Varga, in Sz. 114 (1980), 727–48; Andra´s Molna´r, in Leve´lta´ri Szemle, 37 (1987), 2, 47–59. Most historians from Horva´th on have given these endeavours a bad press; contrast the vindications by Wirkner, Erlebnisse, and by Szo˝gyeńy-Marich, Emle´kiratai.

184


sides proclaimed the need for an elimination of feudalism and backwardness. Officials as well as liberals looked to commercial and industrial advance, from projectors like Pa´szthory and Gyo¨rgy Maila´th in the 1790s to those who drafted the massive legislation of 1840 on bills of exchange and bankruptcy.38 Improved communications by land and water were almost universally regarded as a desideratum. There was widespread backing for legal reform, with greater equality, abolition of aviticitas (the entail system which prevented free trade in land), and rationalization of the intricate and clogged system of seventeen existing jurisdictions. Tax reform, with a relaxation of peasant burdens, and full religious toleration, removing disabilities on non-Catholics, likewise commanded a broad measure of support.39 Even over Magyarization, most patriots came to seek the same ultimate solution as nationalists. Their relation to Hungarian, the mother tongue of most, the working tongue of almost all, certainly by the 1830s, might be more relaxed and pluralist; but it was hardly less positive, for all their rejection of the rhetoric of the opposition, precisely because of its source, and their retention of Pa´szthory’s watchword: ‘absit coactio’.40 Moreover, neither side evinced much solidarity, or a consistent front for antagonism. The royal administration and its judicial personnel certainly looked more embattled by the 1840s, their remaining enlightened traditions increasingly devalued. They were now outflanked by—and to some extent subsumed within—a more authentically reform-conservative grouping, which marched under the banner of ‘cautious advance’ and was lent rather spurious ideological trappings by the writings of the ‘Hungarian Gentz’, Aure´l Dessewffy.41 Meanwhile, serious inconsistencies within the opposition came to the fore, and threatened the anyway slender majority which it could usually command in the Lower House. Some liberals, especially Eo¨tvo¨s and Kemeńy, were fiercely critical of county corruption. Religion also created divisions; and while numerous Catholics rallied to the grievances over mixed marriages (an issue which, often 38 Much evidence in Miha ´ly Horva´th, Az ipar és kereskede´s to¨rteńete Magyarorsza´gon (Buda, 1840), 321 ff. The two 1840 laws, which must be far the longest in the annals of the Hungarian diet, are printed in Magyar to¨rveńyta´r: 1836–68 évi to¨rveńycikkek, ed. D. Ma´rkus et al. (Bp., 1896), 109–45, 160–74; cf. Wirkner, Erlebnisse, 113 ff. 39 On all this, see Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 140 ff. and passim; Gyula Miskolczy, A kamarilla a reformkorszakban (Bp., 1938), 107 ff. For legal reform: Be´la Sarlo´s, Dea´k és Vukovics, ke´t igazsa´gu¨gyminiszter (Bp., 1970); for the existing legal structure: Feńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja, iii. 104–28. For religion, cf. ch. 9 above. 40 ‘Let there be no compulsion’; Szekfu ˝ (ed.), Iratok, doct. 39 (Pa´szthory). By the 1840s the last generation of Hungarian, as opposed to Magyar, patriots was rapidly dying out: prominent ones are discussed in Vendelıń Jankovicˇ, Jań Cˇaplovicˇ, zˇivot, osobnost’, dielo (Turcˇiansky Sva¨ty´ Martin, 1945); in Tibensky´’s introduction to Alojz Mednyansky´ [Alajos Mednyańszky], Malebna´ cesta dolu Va´hom (Brat., 1981); in Istvań Fried, ‘Rumy Ka´roly Gyo¨rgy a kultu´rko¨zvetito˝, 1828–47’, Filolo´giai Ko¨zlo¨ny, 9 (1963), 204–18; and in the autobiography of Johann Pyrker, Mein Leben. 1772–1847, ed. A. P. Czigler (V., 1966). See also above, ch. 8, n. 24; and below, pp. 251f. 41 Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 541 ff., ii. 67 ff.; Jańos Varga, Kereszttu˝zben a Pesti Hirlap: az ellenze´ki és a ko¨ze´putas liberalizmus elva´la´sa 1841–2-ben (Bp., 1983), 101 ff.; Ivań Z. Deńes, ‘The Political Role of Hungary’s Nineteenth-Century Conservatives and How They Saw Themselves’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 845–65, at 849 ff.; id., ibid. 36 (1993), 825–50.


185

overlooked by historians, aroused some of the bitterest passions of the Hungarian Vorma¨rz), loyalist elements among the Protestants mistrusted much of the reform programme. Urban patriciates were very wary of the implications of the enhanced constitutional voice being demanded on behalf of their towns. In the background lurked a deeper malaise: the intrinsic paradox of a campaign to extend civil rights and the suffrage, which feared it might threaten the hegemony of Magyardom in the counties and ultimately in the country as a whole; of a movement which identified individual liberties so surely with one nationality in the state as to drastically limit their validity and alienate even progressives who valued minority cultures.42 Let me recapitulate the argument so far. Hungary’s political stagnation resulted from an impasse between two more or less equally matched parties, both seeking dominance, one from above, the other from below. But the sides actually shared many objectives, and the battle-lines were by no means clearly drawn. Could they not have been reconciled before time ran out for the grand experiment of a renewal of Hungary in reasonably favourable circumstances? A sense of this mission, and the urge to fulfil it, lay at the root of Szećhenyi’s greatness; just as its failure weighed more heavily upon him than upon anyone else. Count Istvań (Stephen) Szećhenyi’s father Ferenc had been a leading public servant of Joseph II, as well as an outstanding patriot (founder of the Hungarian National Museum and Library). Later, disillusioned with progressive ideas, Ferenc lived mainly in Vienna amid a coterie of ultramontane Catholics. His son moved in the opposite direction. He began with intimate Austrian connections and a cosmopolitanism fostered by service in the army. He maintained close links too with senior royal administrators, being—for example—related to the Zıćhys by three separate bonds of wedlock. Yet he felt increasingly impelled to further the cause of his homeland openly, not least through encouragement from Crescence, wife of the younger Ka´roly Zıćhy, whom he married after the latter’s death. Szećhenyi took two famous initiatives: offering a year’s revenue to endow a national Academy; and publishing a treatise in Magyar on what the author called ‘Credit’, but we should describe as economic growth. Neither represented an overtly political gesture—though they were arranged to coincide with the diets of 1825 and 1830. Szećhenyi’s programme envisaged national regeneration by practical activity (what Polish reformers would come to call ‘organic work’): agrarian improvement, modern communications, banks and savings, self-help through publicity, clubs, and societies. He held aloof from oppositional demands for major constitutional change; at the same time he long kept his 42 Classic texts are Eo ¨ tvo¨s, ‘Reform’ (1846), reprinted in id., Reform és hazafisa´g, ed. I. Fenyo˝ (3 vols., Bp., 1978), i. 343–593; and Kemeńy, ‘Korteskede´s e´s ellenszerei’ (1843), reprinted in Va´ltozatok, 7–180. On the vulnerability of the diet opposition, Kecskeme´ti, ‘Seánce circulaire’, 46 f., conveniently brings together some statistics. Horva´th, no friend of the government, nevertheless saw 1844–5 as a real missed opportunity for it: Huszono¨t év, ii. 283–7, 304 ff. For the religious debates, cf. above, ch. 9, n. 12.

186


distance from state institutions. Although wooed by both sides, he sought through strict neutrality to act like a bridge (we might say, recalling his most celebrated project) between the Buda of the royal hirelings and the Pest of the budding revolutionaries, as the mutual stereotypes had it.43 During the 1840s it became clear that Szećhenyi could not sustain this role. Increasingly frightened at the unrest which he saw being unleashed by the agitation of the left, he rounded on Kossuth; temporized on social reforms designed to liberate the peasantry, abolish privilege, and admit commoners to full political participation; and denounced much of the administrative Magyarization now in full swing.44 At the same time, while loosely associated with the central authorities from 1845 as director of a state scheme for regulating the river Tisza, another brainchild of his, Szećhenyi remained an awkward bedfellow as an independent-minded grand seigneur, and one whose attack on chauvinism concerned only the modus operandi. No one could trump him in the urgency of his underlying commitment to the Magyar character of the self-sufficient Hungarian state to which he aspired: it is typical that his roundest castigation of nationalist hotheads was expressed in a presidential address to the Academy which neither he nor any other member imagined should embrace the interests of the non-Magyar cultures of Hungary.45 A good deal of the blame for failing to harmonize the various shades of reformist patriotism must rest with Szećhenyi himself. Precisely because he was so identified with the movement for change, he held himself directly responsible for its direction and pursued deviants with venom. One has only to read his brilliant, visionary, but tortured prose, in its tempestuous prolixity, clothing the most everyday objectives with real or contrived ethical tension, to perceive the workings of a deep psychological instability. Yet this is much more than just the personal tragedy of a man driven to madness and eventual suicide. For Szećhenyi’s published writings, struggling for self-expression in the language with which he felt a complete emotional association, alongside the diary entries, where he expresses his inmost doubts and fears in his German mother tongue, are together emblematic of that flawed cooperation between Hungary and Austria on which his whole scheme of gradual national fulfilment had been predicated. The ‘mixed marriage’; the two parties ‘united in travail by God in 43 The bibliography on Sze ćhenyi is enormous, and I cannot begin to do justice to it here. A very helpful introduction in English to his earlier career is George Barany, Stephen Szećhenyi and the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, 1791–1841 (Princeton, 1968); cf. also Bettina Gneisse, Istvań Szećhenyis Kasinobewegung im ungarischen Reformzeitalter (Frankfurt a.M., 1990). The classic account of Szećhenyi as reform conservative is Gyula Szekfu˝, Ha´rom nemzede´k: egy hanyatlo´ kor to¨rteńete (2nd edn., Bp., 1922), 59 ff. Perceptive contemporary observers are Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 194 ff.; ¨ sszes mu˝vei, vol. ix, ed. P. Gyulai (Bp., 1907), Zsigmond Kemeńy, ‘Gro´f Szećhenyi Istvań’, in O 143–303; and, in English, John Paget, Hungary and Transylvania (2 vols., L., 1839), i. 204–28. 44 On the querelle: Varga, Kereszttu ˝zben; id., Helye´t kereso˝ Magyarorsza´g (Bp., 1982), retailing much of the same information. Szećhenyi, A Magyar Akade´mia ko¨ru¨l, ed. G. Szigethy (Bp., 1981). 45 Examples of Sze ćhenyi’s national ardour in his Vila´g, vagy is felvila´gosı´to´ to¨rede´kek (Pest, 1831), 63 ff., 80 ff; A kelet ne´pe (Pozsony, 1841), 42 ff.; Magyar Akade´mia, 41 ff.


187

His wrath’: Szećhenyi coined his bons mots precisely because he was the completest embodiment of the contradiction.46

Let us therefore turn back to the larger Habsburg context, bracketed out thus far in order that we might clarify the domestic issues. I have argued that the main agencies with responsibility for Hungary were native, not alien growths. Yet, of course, Hungary possessed essentially a royal administration, not a royal government; fundamental decisions were taken across the Austrian frontier, with an eye to the needs of the Empire as a whole. That was not terra incognita for Hungarians: we find them in the rest of the Monarchy in increasing numbers by the early nineteenth century (their experiences cry out for serious investigation). Some must simply have been assimilated, wholly or partly, especially those who entered the army. Diplomats who served abroad could cultivate an amphibious persona, marrying Magyar panache with conventional loyalty to the Ballhausplatz. What matters for present purposes is that few Hungarians joined the Austrian administration. There were, indeed, certain prominent ones. Several of the Josephinist generation moved on to posts abroad: Maila´th in Galicia and Venice, ¨ rmeńyi in Galicia, above all the ubiquitous Zıćhy, who rose through the treasury U and the war ministry to become chairman of the highest policy-making body, the Staats- und Konferenzrat. One of Zıćhy’s successors at the Hofkammer was Miha´ly Na´dasdy, and Reviczky (the later Chancellor) worked there too, as well as in the Austrian provinces. Obscurer officials, like Gervay, could sometimes be found in high places; and it is a nice irony that Venice was lost in March 1848 by a Pa´lffy and a Zıćhy, as civil and military governor. Yet on the whole Hungarian nationals seem conspicuous by their rarity.47 So far so good, for—as we have seen—constitutional and practical constraints made it even harder for Austrians to serve in Hungary. But the near-hermetic sealing of the two administrations had potentially disastrous implications for Hungary, since the highest gesamtmonarchisch, pan-monarchical bodies stood at the apex of the Austrian system only. Potential turned into actual disaster because of a further crucial asymmetry: the loyalty of Hungarian officials to the essential structures of Austrian government was not reciprocated by their opposite numbers, who frequently showed themselves scathing about Hungary and actively subversive of her constitution. Austrian perceptions of Hungary had evolved with the reform programme of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. The new Staatsrat excoriated her backwardness and 46 The diaries are published as Gro ´f Szećhenyi Istvań o¨sszes munkaí, vols. x–xv ¼ Naploí, ed. Gy. Viszota (6 vols., Bp., 1925–39). Cf. below, p. 257. I have expanded aspects of the present argument in History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and D. Cannadine (Camb., 1996), 113–41. 47 Here again, as so often, Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, forms the prime source, for all its vagaries. Cf. below, pp. 249 f.

188


obscurantism, her oppressive seigneurs and noble exemptions (now abolished across the Leitha), which led to an alleged underpayment of taxes; while the very density and comparative efficiency of Austrian administration contributed to a dislike of the Hungarian management of business. Kaunitz was a spokesman for this position; so was Joseph, who dismissed conciliatory memoranda from the Chancellery (when he read them at all) as ‘rubbish’ (Quark) or ‘soap-bubbles’, resting on ‘Hunnish principles’. By the 1790s the Staatsrat gained one Hungarian representative; but the first of these, Izdenczy, turned out to be a very rare example of the totally unpatriotic Magyar. Later advisers, like Somogyi, showed more national spirit; yet the body was progressively downgraded, while the newer Staats- und Konferenzrat proved (despite Zıćhy) not much better.48 Baldacci was viciously anti-Hungarian all the time, the Archduke Charles on occasion. A general lack of sympathy, usually compounded by ignorance and misconception, pervaded these counsels, and the distaste for manners, dress, or language could quickly pass into overt hostility, accompanied by propaganda (as in the 1780s and the years around 1815).49 Those latter years also saw the emergence of the two most notorious pillars of the Vorma¨rz Monarchy. One was the secret police, inherited from the 1790s and directed from Vienna, which used local informers and censors, but proved almost as mistrustful of loyalists as of the opposition.50 Its antics automatically appeared more grotesque in Hungary for being more ineffectual there; but they highlighted a further imbalance between the two halves of the Empire. In Hungary, anti-Austrian sentiments derived from the opposition and were fairly freely expressed, as befitted an essentially open society. In fact criticism was directed primarily at the censorship and at other manifestations of real or supposed external influence within the country—contrast a marked restraint (before the opening of Pandora’s box in 1848) on the nature of Austrian absolutism— and it was partly offset by a certain attractiveness exercised by the city and culture of Vienna, even upon its enemies. In Austria, however, anti-Hungarian sentiments emanated from those closest to the crown, and found expression within the corridors of a much more secretive establishment. Thus Hungarian parochialism, by non-interference, worked to Habsburg advantage; whereas Austrian parochialism meddled devastatingly in Hungary’s affairs. 48 Hock and Bidermann, Staatsrat, 143 f. (quoted) and passim; cf. above, pp. 21, 27 (Kaunitz); Ferenc Strada, Izdenczy Jo´zsef, az A´llamtanaćs elso˝ magyar tagja (Bp., 1943, reprinted from A Bećsi Magyar To¨rteńeti Inte´zet E´vko¨nyve, x). 49 Baldacci etc.: Szekfu ˝ (ed.), Iratok, nos. 44–5, 49; Ba´lint Ho´man and Gyula Szekfu˝, Magyar to¨rteńet (3rd edn., 5 vols., Bp., 1935–6), v. 177 f. A good example of 1780s propaganda is Franz R. Grossing, Jus publicum Hungariae (Halle, 1786); for the 1810s see Anton Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs seit dem Wiener Frieden (2 vols., Leipzig, 1863–5), i. 178 ff. 50 Taka ´ts, Ke´mvila´g. For the overall workings of the police: Ignaz Beidtel, Geschichte der o¨sterreichischen Staatsverwaltung, 1740–1848, ed. A. Huber (2 vols., Innsbruck, 1896–8), ii. 77 ff.; Donald E. Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police: Security and Subversion in the Hapsburg Monarchy, 1815–30 (The Hague, 1968).


189

The other pillar, and an arch-meddler, was Metternich, who began by knowing precious little about Hungary at all. That could be an advantage, since he tended to learn through his contacts with the Zıćhy family—he nursed a grand platonic relationship with the wife of Ka´roly senior and later married the latter’s temperamental granddaughter, Melanie.51 Certainly Metternich gave Hungary much attention; it formed anyway a kind of quasi-foreign political issue which allowed him scope to do so. Certainly he played with the idea, floated by the Palatine Joseph, of more estates’ representation a` la hongroise elsewhere in the Monarchy, and favoured calling the 1825 diet.52 Yet Metternich’s constitutionalism amounted only to the conservation of an ancient monument: ‘Let the edifice stand, but immure the national firebrands within it.’53 He became paranoid about change, and myopic about patriots as well as nationalists. In Metternich’s mind too, stealth and patience were required for ‘the great work of trying to civilize Hungary’ under Austrian auspices. He committed a fatal misjudgement in the 1830s, spurning Szećhenyi, whom he knew well socially (and with whom he, of course, became related through the Zıćhys) as a ‘Decembrist’, then encouraging the razzia against young radicals. Eventually, in 1844, he shifted his tack, forcing acceptance by his governmental colleagues of the Apponyi–Wirkner de´marche, on the grounds that ‘we cannot allow the stomach to think, while the head merely digests’. But that head remained thoroughly Viennese-centralist.54 Those who have tried to exonerate Metternich from this, as from other failings of the Vorma¨rz regime, have tended to locate anti-Hungarian sentiment among a Bohemian clique around his rival, Kolowrat. Such historiography rested largely on a misconception (fanned by inter-war prejudice) about ‘Czech’ influence, and on a reification of personality squabbles in the Staatskonferenz.55 But it does encapsulate the truth that Austria’s administrators were predominantly Bohemian, and that Kolowrat’s own roots, like those of Ku¨beck, and even of the chief of police, Sedlnitzky, lay deep in Josephinist traditions there. More serious was probably the rise of German national sentiment, in bureaucratic guise, while OL P 708, ku´tfo˝ 21, folder 3, fos. 90–100; Srbik, Metternich, i. 238 f., 244 ff. For Metternich’s ‘constitutionalism’: Arthur G. Haas, Metternich: Reorganization and Nationality, 1813–18 (Wiesbaden, 1963); Egon Radvany, Metternich’s Projects for Reform in Austria (The Hague, 1971). Apposite criticisms in Szekfu˝ (ed.), Iratok, 105 ff.; Erzse´bet Andics, Metternich und die Frage Ungarns (Bp., 1973), chs. i and 2. 53 Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, i. 38–41; Andics, Metternich, ch. 3 (quoted). 54 Quoted from Srbik, Metternich, i. 436 f.; cf. ibid. 465–73; Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 274–83; Wirkner, Erlebnisse, 346 ff.; Szekfu˝ (ed.), Iratok, 109 ff., and docts. nos. 344 seqq.; Andics, Metternich, 219 f. and chs. 8–10. 55 Hanns Schlitter, ‘Die Wiener Regierung und die ungarische Opposition im Jahre 1845’, ¨ sterreichs, 4 (V., 1908), 243–95; id., Aus O ¨ sterreichs Vorma¨rz Beitra¨ge zur neueren Geschichte O (4 vols., Zurich etc., 1920), iii; Szekfu˝, Iratok, 65 ff., 106 ff.; Miskolczy, Kamarilla. Metternich encouraged this view himself: ‘Der Tschechismus wie der Magyarismus hatten sich bereits verko¨rpert; der erstere auf dem Wege landja¨hriger Caressen von oben, der andere durch ein Erheben von unten’, Metternich—Hartig: ein Briefwechsel des Staatskanzlers aus dem Exil, 1848–55, ed. F. Hartig (V./Leipzig, 1923), 45. For Kolowrat, see also above, pp. 94, 96, and below, pp. 199 ff. 51 52

190


Austria’s constitutional liberalism—which would, by contrast, seek allies in Hungary—still stood only on the horizon. One final comment on these Austrian attitudes: they represented a general reluctance to see any Hungarian point of view. It is frequently asserted that the Habsburgs indulged a tactic of divide and rule over the nationality frictions in Hungary before 1848. Despite a vague awareness of the possibility as a topos traceable back at least as far as Kaunitz, there is very little real sign of it. Metternich and his colleagues engaged in a brief flirtation with the Croats, returned a dusty answer to the Slovaks, ignored the Rumanians, alienated many local Germans, and so on.56 The indiscriminately unforthcoming stance of Vienna’s ancien re´gime appears more damning than any belated backing for ethnic groups whose main grievance was the very language legislation which— hesitantly but inexorably—it had conceded. Hungary’s misfortune on the eve of revolution thus lay not only in the domestic impasse between reformers from within the system and from without, which frustrated vital measures and favoured only the advance of the Magyar tongue, that wasting and two-edged asset; but also in the asymmetry whereby the loyalty of Hungarian officials went unrequited, and their Austrian counterparts could undermine it by ensuring that concessions on all fronts came too little, too late. Nonetheless the revolutionary outcome was still extremely remote in November 1847, as the noble diet convened for what proved to be the very last time. The Apponyi initiative, clumsily handled, seemed to have failed; yet the whole conservative programme already went further than had the liberal one earlier, and the personable new Palatine Stephen might still be the man to reactivate a broadened administration, while the Kossuthist opposition apparently lacked impetus in the face of inconclusive debates and still thin Lower House majorities.57 Even the dramatic events of March–April 1848 may be claimed (as was suggested before) to display important elements of a grand compromise, much of it—apart from the responsible ministry—already on the table, and sealed by a bureaucracy which, formally superseded, actually proved crucial to its implementation.58 Then followed Vienna’s second profound disservice: unyielding hostility to change suddenly crumbled into a ministry too weak to prevent contagious disorder in Austria, yet heir to most of the anti-Hungarian prejudices of the 56 Ma ´lyusz, Sańdor Lipo´t, 52 n., 387 n. (Kaunitz). I cannot enter here into this subject, where traditional Magyar (and some foreign) accusations have been wildly exaggerated; but see, briefly and accessibly on the most pressing and stormiest issue, Elinor M. Despalatovic´, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (Boulder, Colo., 1975); and, for the fullest case-study, Rapant, Slovensky´ prestolny´ prosbopis. 57 Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 503 f., 512, and passim; Kemeńy, Va´ltozatok, esp. 264, 271 f., 277 ff., 402 ff.; Schlitter, Vorma¨rz, 55 ff.; Istvań Szabo´, Jobba´gyok—parasztok: E´rtekeze´sek a magyar parasztsa´g to¨rteńete´bo˝l, ed. L. Fu¨r (Bp., 1976), 272 ff. Kossuth’s own positions are documented in Kossuth Lajos az utolso´ rendi orsza´gyu˝le´sen, 1847–8, ed. I. Barta (Bp., 1951). 58 Urba ń, Batthyańy Lajos, 248. For a prosopography of the 1848 administration: Erzse´bet F. Kiss, Az 1848–9-es magyar miniszte´riumok (Bp., 1987), esp. 143 ff.


191

counsellors it had displaced. Now the military question came home to roost, not so much because of the international situation (for foreign conflict tended also to draw Austria and Hungary together), but because nationalist ferment threatened the stability of the new regime in Buda-Pest; whereas during the whole period since 1790 this potentially most disruptive aspect of the Hungarian problem had lain largely dormant, surfacing only in intermittent friction over recruits, training, and frontier guards.59 And the response of the nationalities derived extra bitterness from another ill-fated contingency: for the Batthyańy government came on the scene at the moment of maximum discontent over the language issue, when the full Magyar package had just been granted, but no chance had yet been given to palliate and balance its effects with other social and political measures. The revolutionary upshot in 1848–9 proved a traumatic shock which etched more deeply the existing presumptions on both sides of the river Leitha. In that respect, particularly, its results are still with us. Austrian historiography has remained ever since a fair reflection of those contemporary perceptions; and its claim that Hungary was reformable only by Austrian methods and personnel possesses a grain of truth, as the large strides made towards modernization in the neo-absolutist 1850s demonstrate.60 Most Hungarian historiography, likewise taking a contemporary perception as its starting point, has concentrated on the liberal and radical opposition, and seen national salvation to reside in fully autonomous representative institutions. That is a better-directed and more serious assertion. Arguably, however, mid-nineteenth-century Hungary was not really a very liberal place—the insights of a sobered Eo¨tvo¨s and Kemeńy in the 1850s have much to commend them.61 Perhaps only the accidental survival of an ancient constitution conditioned, and also distorted, the priorities of the Magyar Vorma¨rz. The events of 1848 may have swept along many of the younger generation, like the son of Dańiel Ka´szonyi, who became one of the extremest radicals of the day.62 Yet the settlement of the 1860s—and the Compromise is surely the last of the grandiose reconciliations which we have followed since 1790—was made possible by members of that generation: by a regrouping either of cautiously reformist officials like Apponyi, Maila´th, Bedekovich, Szećsen, and Szo˝gyeńy, 59 Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s, ii. 75–132; Horva´th, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme, 231 ff., 309 ff.; id., Huszono¨t év, i. 468–70 and passim; Feńyes, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja, ii. 145 ff., iii. 53–5. 60 The massive contemporary self-congratulation by Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, needs to be balanced by the yet more massive modern evaluation by Harm-Hinrich Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus: Staatsfinanzen und Politik, 1848–60 (2 vols., Go¨ttingen, 1978). Cf. below, ch. 15. For the historiography of 1848–9 itself, cf. R. J. W. Evans, in 1848: Ereignis und Erinnerung in den politischen Kulturen Mitteleuropas, ed. B. Haider and H. P. Hye (Vienna, 2003), 31–55. 61 See particularly [Eo ¨ tvo¨s], Die Garantien der Macht und Einheit Oesterreichs (Leipzig, 1859), esp. 43 ff., 138 ff.; and Kemeńy’s ‘Forradalom utań’ and ‘Me´g egy szo´ a forradalom utań’, in Va´ltozatok, 181–559. 62 Da ńiel Ka´szonyi [junior], Magyarhon ne´gy korszakai, ed. D. Kosa´ry (Bp., 1977).

192


or of moderate liberals touched, however much they might have sought to emancipate themselves from it, by the accommodating patriotism of their fathers. Eo¨tvo¨s, after all, was the son of a thoroughly loyal Vice-President of the Chamber; Ka´lmań Tisza of one of the toughest county administrators of the 1840s.63 Subsequent Hungarian governments continued to act in the spirit of conservative reform with constitutional trimmings. They proceeded to construct a neo-Josephinist bureaucratic edifice much indebted to Austrian models (‘administrative centralization in Hungary is second to none’, declared an informed observer in 1914); they remained fatefully wedded to the old noble ethos of ancien re´gime officialdom; they faced the same insubordination from parliamentary deputies and the counties which in the end Istvań Tisza, taking a leaf from his grandfather’s book, sought to root out through decree and manipulation.64 By the stormy years of that second Vorma¨rz before 1914, the Hungarian authorities were as embattled as their early nineteenth-century predecessors, and almost as vulnerable to Austrian subversion, even if their share in running the Gesamtstaat had become much larger. It is a quaint detail with which to conclude that when loyalism faced the last great challenge to its vision, the last great choice of options, at the coming of the First World War, the AustroHungarian ambassador in Paris was another Szećsen, and in Berlin another Szo˝gyeńy.

63 For Eo ¨ tvo¨s’s background, see Schlett, Eo¨tvo¨s, 10 ff. There appears to be nothing of substance on Lajos Tisza; but Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 327 ff., outlines his machinations, if such they were. For a shrewd interpretation of the 1867 Compromise as a product of traditional ‘transaction’, see La´szlo´ Pe´ter, ‘The Dualist Character of the 1867 Hungarian Settlement’, in Hungarian History— World History, ed. Gy. Rańki (Bp., 1984), 85–164; reworked in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Rumpler and Urbanitsch, vii. 239–540, at 299–337 and passim. 64 Barany, in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, ii. 311 (quoting the president of the Administrative Court) and passim. For the whole problem, see Ga´bor Vermes, Istvań Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist (Boulder, Colo., 1985).

11 Empire and Kingdoms: Hungary and Bohemia in the Monarchy, 1741–1871 Of all the neglected relationships among different regions of Central Europe, that between Hungary and Bohemia, the two most important building blocks of the whole Habsburg power edifice, is surely the most important. Though we know something about cultural contacts, political linkages, where they are noticed at all, continue to be construed at the level of crude and negative perceptions: the Czechs complicitous in attempts to impose absolutism on the Hungarians; the latter always seeking to steal a constitutional march on the Czechs. This essay provides a broadly chronological survey, beginning with responses to the state-building process initiated by the Silesian wars, when Bohemia and Hungary went their markedly different ways, yet interacted significantly with each other at the political and cultural centre. Some themes are drawn out in the period of Metternich (who himself belonged to networks in both countries), and these lead us to the upsurge of ethnic awareness throughout the region by the midnineteenth century, when Magyars and Czechs were caught up in a largely antagonistic relationship, whereas other contacts across the common frontier were much more productive. The constitutional contest which yielded the 1867 Compromise, but thwarted parallel negotiations with the Czechs four years later, confirmed the mutual alienation of large sections of the political elites in Hungary and Bohemia. Yet that outcome was by no means complete or preordained. An effective cooperation between Hungarian and Bohemian ‘peripheries’ against the Austrian ‘centre’ forms one of the great might-havebeens in the history of Mitteleuropa.

My title contains a deliberate piece of imprecision. In 1741 the Habsburg lands did not constitute an ‘empire’. In the whole of Europe there existed—give or take the tsarist realm, whose status remained a matter of dispute for contemporaries1—still only one of those: the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation; and this Reich was indeed for the most part ruled by the Habsburgs (though not, as it happened, in 1741!), but in a largely indirect way and on a different historical and juristic footing. Nevertheless the word is freely employed for the territories directly governed by the dynasty, not so much because roughly half of them did fall within the Reich, as because they hardly resembled any other Unpublished; first drafted in Hungarian for a lecture at the University of Szeged in 1995. 1 Cf. above, ch. 1, n. 17.

194


kind of constitutional configuration. Thus the Monarchy was a singular and indeterminate form of state, quite different from the two well-defined kingdoms incorporated into it whose interplay will be examined in this essay. The historiographies of Hungary and Bohemia alike possess correspondingly well-defined and internally coherent traditions. For that very reason the one has rarely contemplated the other. Comparative research is conspicuous by its absence, especially in respect of post-medieval periods. There is only hazy awareness that social and structural similarities obtained between the two countries. Beyond that, two lines of enquiry have yielded serious historiographical results. After 1945, in the decades of Socialist friendship, studies of amicable contacts between the Magyar and Czech peoples predictably flourished. We learned more about the joint enterprises of the political estates in their opposition to the Habsburgs during the years 1604–20. The great Czech educator Comenius rightly attracted attention, with his Hungarian ancestors (the Szeges family) and his stay at the college of Sa´rospatak. Conversely there was work on Ferenc II Ra´koćzi’s schooldays in Jindrˇichu˚v Hradec, in the south of Bohemia, and on Ferenc Kazinczy’s years of incarceration in Brno (described in his famous diary), as well as on the fate in the Spielberg and Josephstadt of sundry Hungarian rebels condemned after 1849. A more extensive cultural link from the same period as Kazinczy were the Calvinist ministers who settled in Bohemia after the Patent of Toleration in 1781 and nurtured the newly established Protestant congregations there.2 Much remains to be done on this front. One theme, utterly neglected of course in the decades after 1945, would be the aristocrats from one country who settled in the other: in 1785 the Illesha´zys and Sereńyis counted among the ten largest landowners in Moravia. It is well known that later Gustav Kalnoky, from a similar background, became foreign minister of the Dual Monarchy; but less so that his successor in 1914, Leopold Berchtold, belonged to a family naturalized in Hungary as well as Austria.3 The many wandering journeymen and artisans, and later skilled industrial workers, especially in textiles, also belong here. So do the Jews from Bohemian and Moravian ghettos, who revitalized the spiritual life of Hungarian communities at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, from Pe´ter Bee´r at Nagymarton/Mattersdorf in the west right across to A´ron Chorin at Arad on the Great Plain. Altogether it would be valuable, now that border studies are in vogue, to examine in detail the history 2 E. Fo ¨ ldes and I. Me´sza´ros (ed.), Comenius and Hungary (Bp., 1973); Szo¨reńyi, in Ra´koćzitanulmańyok, ed. Ko¨peczi et al., 291–315. Richard Prazˇa´k, Cseh-magyar pa´rhuzamok: tanulmańyok a 18–19. sza´zadi mu˝velo˝ de´sto¨rteńeti kapcsolatokro´l (Bp., 1991), 65–8 (Kazinczy) and passim; much the same text in id., Cˇesko-mad’arske´ kulturnı´ vztahy. On ministers: id., Mad’arska´ reformovana´ inteligence. 3 Kroupa, Alchymie ˇ steˇstı´, 19 (landowners). Walter Rauscher, Zwischen Berlin und St. Petersburg: Die o¨sterreichisch-ungarische Außenpolitik unter Gustav Graf Ka´lnoky, 1881–95 (V., 1993); Hugo Hantsch, Leopold Graf Berchtold, Grandseigneur und Staatsmann (2 vols., Graz, 1963), i. 6 ff. passim; the beginnings of a broader approach to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Sˇlechta v habsburske´ monarchii a cı´sarˇsky´ dvu˚r, 1526–1740, ed. V. Bu˚zˇek and P. Kra´l (Cˇeske´ Budeˇjovice, 2003).

Empire and Kingdoms

195

and character of that ancient but somewhat illogical and highly porous frontier which ran—and now again runs, as the boundary between the Czech and Slovak Republics—from near Brˇeclav, past Hodonıń, Skalica/Szakolcza, and Trencˇ´ın/ Trencseń over the Javornı´k all the way across to the Jablunka pass.4 Yet borders also spawn animosities, and a more widespread belief holds that the whole Magyar–Czech relationship has been antagonistic. This view was particularly common in the inter-war period, and evidence could easily be assembled in support of it.5 A notorious episode occurred in the 1670s when the Habsburgs, purportedly incited by their Bohemian advisers, sought to suppress Hungarian freedoms along the lines already mapped out in Bohemia after the battle of the White Mountain. ‘The Hungarians will soon have the fine plumes torn out of their fur caps, and that unruly people shall be bridled,’ said one malicious contemporary: ‘the gold and silver buttons on their dolmans will be replaced with lead ones, their legs forced into Czech breeches and a yoke placed round their arrogant necks.’6 Later however, from the 1860s onwards, Czechs complained vehemently about the Magyars’ alleged assumption of power within the Monarchy. Evidently the whole Slovak dimension progressively complicated the issue: on the one hand it brought together the Slav inhabitants of Upper Hungary with their Bohemian ‘brethren’, if that was the mot juste; on the other it sowed ever deeper enmity between Czechs and Magyars in the course of the nineteenth century. Thus the mutual relations of the two kingdoms could become a serious factor in the internal history of each of them, and be affected in their turn by domestic considerations. But my purpose here is not to dwell on such specific matters. Rather I propose to sketch a further series of topics, in which both positive and negative traits of the Hungarian–Bohemian connection played their part, but setting them in a broader context. This is the pan-monarchical perspective. Historians across Europe have come to appreciate how much more subtly we need to handle the transition from early-modern ‘composite monarchies’ into modern states, a process in which the Habsburg lands occupy a very distinctive place. And here, from the mid-eighteenth century on, Hungary and Bohemia were the crucial determinants. Even while Vienna burgeoned into a decorative imperial metropolis, the significance of the German provinces within the Monarchy declined and the reichsdeutsch heritage began to atrophy as both 4 For artisans, see the extraordinary series, Die Handwerkskundschaften mit Ortsansichten: Beschreibender Katalog der Arbeitsattestate wandernder Handwerksgesellen, 1731–1830, comp. K. Stopp (17 vols., Stuttgart, 1982–92), esp. vi–viii, xii–xiii. For Jews: McCagg, Habsburg Jews; Christian d’Elvert, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Ma¨hren und Oesterreich-Schlesien, mit Ru¨cksicht auf Oesterreich-Ungarn u¨berhaupt, und die Nachbarla¨nder (Bru¨nn, 1895); R. Kropf (ed.), Juden im Grenzraum: Geschichte, Kultur und Lebenswelt der Juden im burgenla¨ndisch-westungarischen Raum und in den angrenzenden Regionen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Eisenstadt, 1993). For the border: cf. above, pp. 118 f., 122, 129, 133. 5 Cf. R. J. W. Evans, ‘Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks: Some Mutual Perceptions’, in Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, 1918–48, ed. M. Cornwall and Evans 6 Szo ¨ reńyi, in Ra´koćzi-tanulmańyok, ed. Ko¨peczi et al., 291 (italics mine). (forthcoming).

196


material support and legitimating principle (the long-planned, but ultimately abortive Belgian–Bavarian swap was its last great chance). Yet no putative Austria—as state idea or as concrete foundation—could replace it. Neither the existing Italian nor the prospective Polish possessions could seriously modify this power-political situation. The Habsburgs were dependent: partly on Bohemia, which despite wars, emigrations, and territorial losses—in 1763 they finally had to acquiesce in Prussia’s appropriation of most of Silesia—remained their wealthiest and most advanced realm; partly on Hungary, which since the expulsion of the Turks formed the largest, most populous, and as yet most under-exploited part of the Monarchy.

1741 proved a fateful year for the young Maria Theresa, as she stood out against the German and French opponents in alliance against her. If we contemplate our two kingdoms in 1741, they present a curious picture. Thirty years after the Ra´koćzi insurrection the Hungarian estates, as we have seen, proclaimed themselves ready to sacrifice ‘life and limb’ for their sovereign (albeit not unconditionally!—but the gesture really mattered). By contrast a majority of the cosseted and supposedly allegiant Bohemian estates deserted her and acknowledged the duke of Bavaria or, in the Silesian case, the king of Prussia.7 The consequences of that act would likewise make themselves felt. Thenceforth the enterprising and resolute Queen and her active new ministers rarely interfered in Hungarian affairs, beyond the reform plans which it proved possible to implement on the basis of a sometimes grudging consent: the Urbarium, the Ratio Educationis, judicial and administrative innovations. In Bohemia, however, systemic change took place: the country’s Chancellery was amalgamated with its Austrian equivalent; taxes were levied on the nobility; estates’ institutions withered; new legal channels led up to a supreme court in Vienna; attempts were made to set agrarian society on new foundations.8 Thus whereas the main features of Hungarian statehood were preserved, their Bohemian equivalents suffered severe attrition. Yet this coin had an equally important obverse. Hungary stayed on the periphery of the centralizing, modernizing Habsburg regime. Even if certain Hungarians stood close to the dynasty as counsellors and confidants—and Ka´roly Batthyańy, the general and royal tutor, Samuel Brukenthal, the Saxon chief, and further self-made men like Antal Grassalkovich and Pa´l Festetics have already appeared on these pages—they tended to operate largely within their own sphere, within the domain which was defined by the country’s estates-based administration, its Latinate political culture, and its separate judicial processes still substantially based on the sixteenth-century customal of Cf. above, pp. 17 f., 91 f. Dickson, Finance and Government, i. 89 ff., 283 ff., ii. 211–42; Wright, Serf, Seigneur, and Sovereign. 7 8

Empire and Kingdoms

197

Werbo˝czi.9 Meanwhile, however, Bohemians more or less took over the running of the Monarchy. Not only Haugwitz, Maria Theresa’s first great minister; not only Kaunitz, who for forty years wielded decisive influence, initially in foreign policy and then in domestic affairs too: a long list of members of Bohemia’s ruling elite participated in Viennese government. Again I can recapitulate from an earlier essay: the first four chairmen of the United Court Chancellery—two Choteks, a Blu¨megen, and a Kolowrat—all came from there. The last of these, Leopold Kolowrat, became probably the longest-serving of all senior imperial bureaucrats.10 The aristocratic official thus became a characteristically Bohemian phenomenon. But the country furnished managerial cadres at a lower level too, who derived from the mainly diminutive but comparatively numerous and urbanized municipalities, and who paraded their competence in German as a kind of passport for crossing the Austrian border. This new secular element joined with an ecclesiastical one, since Bohemia simultaneously supplied much of the impetus for the Jansenist ideas which gained increasing backing from the regime under Maria Theresa. Here the native Hussite heritage played some part (though it should not be exaggerated) in underpinning a wider revulsion from baroque pieties and fostering a spirit of educational change: names such as Kresl and Rautenstrauch, Felbiger and Kindermann were all associated with the Bohemian lands. As yet, however, Hungary manifested these currents much less. The common frontier remained not merely a commercial barrier and customs line, not merely an administrative and legal barrier, but an intellectual divide which engendered continuing suspicion of the world on the other side, not least— perhaps especially—among the educated. The antipathy with which the Hungarian estates reacted to external intervention at the 1764–5 diet mirrored the repugnance that Kaunitz and others displayed towards them at sessions of the Staatsrat.11 There the Czech breeches were again being measured for size. The farther-reaching Josephinism of the 1780s built on these foundations. Joseph II, whose ideal had been a thoroughly integrated Monarchy, achieved precisely the reverse: he widened the chasm between Hungary and the inherited lands, particularly Bohemia. Hungary’s public life was threatened with total metamorphosis, spearheaded by new-fangled districts—designed to cluster and control the historic counties—which were essentially transplants of the originally Bohemian kraj (Kreis) system, and by linguistic Germanization, which played to the Bohemian bureaucratic interest.12 Resistance became so fierce that it traversed the frontier and provoked a crisis on the other side. But this first modern 9 Above, pp. 19 ff.; for Werbo ˝czi see M. Rady (ed.), Custom and Law in Central Europe (Camb., 2003). Cf. also the text discussed by Milan Sˇmerda in K pocteˇ Jaroslava Marka: sbornı´k pracı´ k 70. narozenina´m, ed. L. Sleza´k and R. Vlcˇek (Pr., 1996), 183–98. 10 Above, pp. 94 f. 11 Ibid. Szabo, Kaunitz. For Jansenism etc.: Be ˇlina et al., Velke´ deˇjiny, x, esp. 220 ff. 12 Hajdu, II. Jo ´zsef igazgata´si reformjai, covers the whole modus operandi.

198


case of marked mutual impact between Hungary and Bohemia involved little direct influence. Joseph’s legacy looked quite different in the latter country, where the Emperor not only numbered his most intimate advisers—such as Friedrich Nostitz and Johann Karl Dietrichstein—but enjoyed genuine popularity, as evidenced by an idolizing Czech folk book (the Kniha Jozefova) and by tales of the plough of Slavı´kovice (when the imperial-royal hand had itself turned the Moravian sod). When the Bohemian diet successfully pressed to be allowed to meet again in 1790, it imitated its Hungarian counterpart, but did not collude with it.13

For both kingdoms the 1790s brought restoration of the estates’ role in government. In Bohemia that meant the Austrophile compromise reached under Maria Theresa. In Hungary, however, it yielded a statutory settlement which not only required recognition of the country’s distinct consistentia and constitutio (an almost impossible condition, if these words were really to be taken to signify ‘structure of state’ and ‘constitutional life’), but prescribed that it was not to be ruled ‘ad normam aliarum provinciarum’.14 This demeaning expression, setting Hungary apart from the Habsburgs’ other ‘provinces’, reveals much about the incompatibilities of the Monarchy at that time. Yet the French wars helped re-establish a temporary balance. At the same time the territorial losses suffered by the dynasty on German, Italian, Polish, and South-Slav soil further underlined the key geographical and political place of Bohemia and Hungary within the Habsburg realms: not by accident did their military centre of gravity also prove in 1805 to lie somewhere between Austerlitz and Pressburg. Meanwhile those realms had become a true empire, even if the proclamation of 1804—to avoid reviving the tensions of fifteen years before—created an Austrian Kaiser only (not an official Austrian Kaisertum), while that of 1806 dissolved the Holy Roman Empire unilaterally and thus without full statutory force.15 In this old-new empire there was Hungarian participation across the Leitha too. The cosmopolitan magnates still adapted best. We encountered a good instance in the last essay: Count Ka´roly Zıćhy who, dogged rather than talented, rose to become head of the Hofkammer, then minister of war, and finally president of the Staats- und Konferenzrat. Ever more petty-noble or non-noble state officials made careers in Austria, as well as members of the intellectual 13 Cf. above, pp. 93, 143, for the Kniha and the Slavı ´kovice episode. Anna M. Drabek in Die bo¨hmischen La¨nder zwischen Ost und West, ed. F. Seibt (V., 1983), 132–42. Cf. below, p. 248. 14 Marczali, 1790/1-diki orsza ´ ggyu˝le´s (2 vols., Bp., 1907), ii.1–74 and passim on the genesis of this formulation. It formed the crux of later claims: cf. Pe´ter in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Rumpler and Urbanitsch, vii. 239–540, at 245 ff. 15 Detail of this confusing issue in Heinrich von Srbik, Das o ¨sterreichische Kaisertum und das ¨ sterreich und das Ende des Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reiches, 1804–6 (Berlin, 1927); Gottfried Mraz, O Reich, 1804–6: Ende und Vollendung (V., 1993).

Empire and Kingdoms

199

‘second society’ in Vienna (though a chapter in Hungary’s cultural and social history remains to be written about them). But immigrants from Bohemia were still far commoner, from artisans to industrial entrepreneurs, from artists to ecclesiastical functionaries, and with continuing disproportionate representation in the highest offices of state. Another Kolowrat (but from a different branch of the family) well exemplifies this phenomenon: Franz Anton, a more substantial figure than Zıćhy, who after extended service in the highest Bohemian post (as Grand Burgrave) became minister of state, i.e. chief of the whole Austrian domestic administration, for twenty-three years. Under him there featured at the end of the Habsburg ancien re´gime all ranks of his fellow-countrymen, from the Moravian aristocrat Sedlnitzky as chief of police and another—but parvenu— president of the Hofkammer, Karl Ku¨beck, down to the army of ‘Wenzels’ who were popularly believed to owe their employment to networks of patriotic patronage.16 Gyula Miskolczy, one of the few Hungarian historians to have addressed such issues of imperial politics, advanced the thesis that it was precisely this Bohemian ‘camarilla’ which frustrated a reconciliation between Hungary and Vienna on a moderately conservative ‘Metternichian’ foundation, and thus precipitated the events of 1848.17 It is an eccentric and exaggerated construction: Miskolczy too was obsessed with Czech breeches. We should not forget that Metternich, even if (helped by Ka´roly Zıćhy) he secured Hungarian indigenatus and estates, was an aristocrat with his country seat in Bohemia. But there is a grain of truth in it. Since this high Austrian politics of the Vorma¨rz belonged eminently to the world of Istvań Szećhenyi, it is worth interrogating his celebrated Diaries again in the present context. Szećhenyi likewise apprehended Bohemia’s primacy within the Monarchy, and at times railed against it, especially in military guise. ‘Won’t it be fine if in the end the whole Hungarian nation submits itself voluntarily to the Bohemians.’ The trouble did not really lie in the army itself—even though Radetzky, Windischgra¨tz, and their like also came from the Bohemian lands— but, characteristically for Austria, in the military bureaucracy. Szećhenyi’s most malevolent opponent was the emperor’s aide-de-camp, Kutschera (who allegedly gained his post through proficiency on the viola): ‘Realized how much the Bohemians have outgrown us. Deep, bitter sorrow about this in my heart.’18 At the same time Szećhenyi greatly appreciated, indeed envied, not only the rival kingdom’s material progress, but even the physical prowess of its citizens. ‘Bohemian people are big and strong . . . the Bohemian element is nobler and 16 Zı ćhy etc.: above, pp. 179, 187. Kolowrat etc.: cf. above, pp. 94, 96. ‘Wenzel’: Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 234–9; Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen, 199. 17 Miskolczy, Kamarilla. 18 Sze ćhenyi, Naploí, ii. 170: ‘Es wird auch hu¨bsch, wenn endlich die ganze ungarische Nation den Bo¨hmen sich freywillig unterwerfen wird’; ibid. 217: ‘Eingesehen, wie sehr die Bo¨hmen uns u¨ber die Ko¨pfe gewachsen. Tiefer, bitterer Schmerz deshalb in meinem Herzen’; cf. 348, 516, 603. For the Diaries, cf. above, pp. 186 f. Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 114 (Kutschera).

200


more handsome than our own . . . ’19 Szećhenyi’s degree of engagement and cognizance (however weird at times) diverged markedly from the Hungarian average, even among his aristocratic contemporaries. The typical Magyar gentleman—and here a highly important difference between the two countries must be underlined, since in Bohemia this second ruling stratum was predominantly non-noble, or at least possessed no rural estate or manor-house—such a gentleman kept clear of any kind of ‘imperial’ involvement, whether it took the form of opportunity or obligation. He held himself ready to man the barricades, ensconced behind the constitution and the county system. Yet the oppositional slogans changed in one crucial respect: they came to be formulated more and more in Magyar than in Latin. Thus we start to confront the ethnic factor which by the middle of the nineteenth century exercised a profound impact on our whole subject. In the passages just cited, written around 1830, Szećhenyi’s term ‘Bo¨hmen’ is probably still best rendered as ‘Bohemian’, though ‘Czech’ now soon became the standard identifier for the majority population there (Szećhenyi was anyway a conservative in such things— otherwise he would not have continued to keep his diary in German).20 In Hungary things moved rather faster: at just that time the existing national society was already beginning to open its ranks to magyarophone commoners and cut itself off from non-speakers of what, as we saw in the previous chapter, finally became the official language during those same years. What matters most for present purposes: its rising modern national self-awareness strengthened the separate status of that Magyar society vis-a`-vis the other territories of the Monarchy. In Bohemia the whole elite long carried on speaking German (at least as a second language), and its relationship to the dynasty and the central authorities for that and other reasons remained far more direct. Much the same happened with cultural institutions, which emerged in parallel in the two countries. In Bohemia an academy (Bo¨hmische Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften) came first, before the end of the previous century; in Hungary a national museum, the creation of Szećheńyi pe`re, just after 1800. Then there followed in 1818 a Bohemian Landesmuseum, with much help from aristocratic dignitaries like Franz Anton Kolowrat; together with an equivalent Moravian foundation. Hungary’s Academy, another magnate-led body inspired by Szećhenyi, dated from 1825, and was already so squarely Magyar in its priorities that other nationalities, led by the local Serbs, looked to form their own organizations.21 In Bohemia the non-German majority, like Hungary’s non-Magyar Szećhenyi, Naploí, iii. 324 f., v. 382, vi. 244 ff.; vi. 515 ff. For usage in Bohemia: Korˇalka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich, 44–75; cf. for Hungary, Evans, ‘Austrian Identity’, 33. 21 Prokes ˇ, Pocˇa´tky Cˇeske´ spolecˇnosti nauk; Jeno˝ Berla´sz, Az Orsza´gos Szećheńyi Ko¨nyvta´r to¨rteńete, 1802–67 (Bp., 1981); Hanusˇ, Na´rodnı´ Museum; Sańdor Końya, A Magyar Tudomańyos Akade´mia ma´sf él évsza´zada, 1825–1975 (Bp., 1975); Zˇivan Milisavac, Matica srpska, 1826–1964 (Novi Sad, 1965). Note that the son Szećhenyi by design spelled his name differently from his father (Szećheńyi). 19 20

Empire and Kingdoms

201

one, made its presence felt more and more. This too yielded parallels, even linkages: the Czechs’ Matice of 1831, to promote vernacular learning, imitated the Serbs’ Matica in Pest of five years earlier.22 But Hungary, with its half-dozen unofficial ethnic groups, could not conceivably have witnessed what occurred in Bohemia, where the Czechs simply began to hijack the existing ‘national’ institutional structure, above all the (henceforth not so much ‘Landes-’ as ‘Vlastenecke´’) Museum. Not that this fresh quasi-political force was disloyal to the Habsburgs or their Monarchy: back in 1791 Bohemia’s Slavs had declared their ‘devotion’ (Anha¨nglichkeit) to the ruling house. This address, the first germ of the Austro-Slav ideology, was delivered in German by their erudite éminence grise, the Hungarian-born Josef Dobrovsky´.23 But in time Slavonic cultural claims would combine with other social and political grievances, which proved all the more dangerous for the regime in that they were shared by the Czechs’ German compatriots.

A reformist opposition could, of course, really only function before 1848 in Hungary, where the ancient constitution allowed it far more scope. There indeed discontent revealed itself most openly—not least because of Bohemia’s rapid economic progress, which triggered the Ve´degylet, or protectionist movement of the mid-forties. My impression (though some Hungarian historians think differently) is that Magyar liberal politicians continued to display little inclination to interfere in the ‘internal affairs’—as they were perceived—of other parts of the Monarchy: perhaps Wesseleńyi’s Szo´zat forms the only serious exception.24 But now in the 1840s the Bohemians at last began to follow the Hungarian example. For the moment this retaliation by the Magyar dolman (as it were) remained modest in extent: more influential was the campaign of Irish Catholics under O’Connell. But a significant relationship began thereby to be fashioned, at once emulative and competitive.25 The effects, part-positive and part-negative, began to show in the political and the ethnic spheres alike. Certain passages in Szećhenyi’s Diaries cast light on both. Once he meets his fellow-aristocrat Joseph Thun, who describes the struggle for constitutionality being waged in Prague; upon which Szećhenyi observes that Hungary has more than enough of that commodity. A little earlier 22 Anna M. Drabek in Vereinswesen und Geschichtspflege in den bo ¨hmischen La¨ndern, [ed. M. Neumu¨ller] (Mun., 1986), 71–96. 23 For Dobrovsky ´ ’s Hungarian connections, cf. Prazˇa´k, Cseh-magyar pa´rhuzamok, 47 ff.; id., Cˇesko-mad’arske´ kulturnı´ vztahy, 57 ff. 24 Miklo ´ s Wesseleńyi, Szo´zat a magyar és szla´v nemzetise´g u¨gye´ben [1843], ed. A´. Dea´k (Bp., 1992), 277. also publ. in German as Eine Stimme u¨ber die ungarische und slawische Nationalita¨t (Leipzig, 1844); cf. Evans, ‘Austrian Identity’, 27 f. See also below, pp. 230 f. and A´gnes Dea´k, in Ko¨lcsey ta´rsasa´g: fu¨zetek, 8 (1997?), 17–38, and in Ungarn-Jahrbuch, 24 (1998/9), 87–104, at 91 ff. 25 Connections detailed in Praz ˇa´k, Cseh-magyar pa´rhuzamok, 75 ff.; cf. id., Cˇesko-mad’arske´ kulturnı´ vztahy, 90 ff.

202


Kolowrat, the minister of state, complains to him that he, Szećhenyi, is one of the begetters of the current troublesome ‘Slawismus in Bo¨hmen’ (though we may recall it was rather Kolowrat himself who played that role).26 The Czechs admired the Magyars’ national zeal, but deplored the latter’s maltreatment of the local Slav populations. The best contemporary instance of that was the wellpublicized exchange in 1842–3 between Count Leo Thun (Joseph’s cousin) and the Hungarian opposional politician Ferenc Pulszky, in which they argued about the condition of the Slovaks while adducing broader European comparisons, altogether interesting early documentation in the debate about state languages and the rights of nationalities.27 For our purposes it is worth noting that Pulszky, for all his achievements as a political and intellectual liberal, can definitely be classed as a Magyar nationalist, in the full sense of the term; whereas Thun was no kind of Czech nationalist, but rather an ethnically amphibious Bohemian magnate. By 1848, however, authentic Czech nationalists already existed. Frantisˇek Palacky´ was not only their acknowledged leader, but also their most conspicuous link with Hungary. The Protestant Palacky´ had been born in eastern Moravia as the son of a small trader and village teacher, and he attended Lutheran secondary schools across the border at Trencseń/Trencˇ´ın and then in Pressburg. He was well familiar with Hungarian noble society, and for quite a time felt comfortable in it. From that experience there allegedly derived what some viewed as his own rather genteel manners when he settled in Bohemia as the kingdom’s official historiographer.28 At the start of the revolutionary year Palacky´ became famous for his apparent volte-face, when in a letter to the organizers of the prospective German assembly at Frankfurt he declined their invitation as incompatible with his loyalty to the Monarchy. If Austria did not already exist, he said, with an aphorism already alluded to in these pages, it would be necessary to invent it. Or in Palacky´’s own German (which he used in everyday dealings, with his wife for example, as much as Szećhenyi, or for that matter Pulszky): ‘Wahrlich, existierte der oesterreichische Kaiserstaat nicht schon la¨ngst, man mu¨ßte im Interesse Europas, im Interesse der Humanita¨t selbst sich beeilen, ihn zu schaffen.’29 From the Hungarian standpoint it is striking (though I have never seen this mentioned) that the Frankfurt letter delineates Bohemia’s historical nexus to the German Reich in terms which make one think he could have had Hungary’s constitutional relationship to the Habsburg Monarchy in mind; even the idea of Szećhenyi, Naploí, vi. 208, 232, 650, 663; v. 698. Leo Thun, Die Stellung der Slovaken in Ungarn (Pr., 1843); cf. below, p. 250. For a broader context, cf. R. J. W. Evans in Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century, ed. G. H. Jenkins (Cardiff, 1998), 397–424, esp. 397, 405, 414. 28 For Palacky ´ ’s experience of Hungary, see his early autobiographies in Dı´lo Frantisˇka Palacke´ho, ed. J. Charva´t (Pr., 1941 [recte 1945]), i. 7–61. Cf. K. Ka´lal, Palacke´ho mlada´ le´ta (Pr., 1925); Richard Prazˇa´k, ‘Palacky´ a mad’arˇi prˇed 1848’, Cˇasopis Matice Moravske´, 77 (1958), 74–99; Korˇalka, Frantisˇek Palacky´, 25 ff. Cf. also below, p. 260. 29 Cf. above, p. 98 and n. 41. Sze ćhenyi’s wife: above, pp. 185 f ; Pulszky’s spouse was also Austrian. 26 27

Empire and Kingdoms

203

‘invention’, as a figure of speech, is strongly reminiscent, not just of Voltaire, but of a formulation of Wesseleńyi’s in his Szo´zat.30 It is well known how the 1848 revolution began with general inter-ethnic enthusiasm (just think of the Hungarian and Bohemian students, who found themselves together in Vienna in March), but swiftly led to deep rifts. Most important for us are the internecine struggles, on the one hand in Bohemia between Germans and Czechs, on the other in Hungary between Magyars and other nationalities. Both Germans and Magyars represented the liberal ideology of the day (roughly speaking, and to put things at their plainest), and via Vienna and Frankfurt they managed to establish a loose cooperation. Yet neither of them succeeded in controlling the domestic situation; still less could they ensure the stability of an empire which neither felt responsible for (it is a different question whether they wished to break away from it—mostly not). Their adversaries, who were in no position to assume power either in Bohemia or Hungary, likewise attempted to achieve some common organization. In the process they came into conflict to some extent with the attainments of the liberal reform programme: but whereas the Transleithanian opposition had to try to demolish the new Hungarian constitutional order, the Czechs sought to adapt the new Austrian constitutionality for their own ends. A key stage, and one of the most arresting moments, in this evolution was the Reichstag debate in Vienna on 19 September 1848, when a Hungarian delegation appealed to ‘the peoples of Austria’ over the heads of dynasty and government. I shall consider this dramatic episode in a later chapter.31 Here we should note that prominent among those demanding to receive the Magyars were Bohemian Germans (Borrosch, Lo¨hner, Schuselka), while Czechs (Palacky´, Rieger, Trojan, Havelka, Helfert) were vociferous on the other side. The latter prevailed, and the Austro-Hungarian rupture widened into civil war. On their own the Slav movements could not have prospered in 1848; hence their alliances with elements of the ancien re´gime both at home (numerous members of the Hungarian and Bohemian estates) and beyond (the Habsburgs, their court and their army). They thereby lent the general campaign of restoration its most serious theoretical postulate, the ‘Austro-Slav’ idea; but concurrently subordinated themselves to a reactionary camp which took less and less account of their aspirations. By the new year this reinstated Austrian government, and not its Czech-led federalist prote´ge´s, provoked a final breach with the now autonomous Hungarian authorities. At that stage Bohemian public opinion, including its moderate and radical Czech groupings, already tended to side with the Magyars.32 The defeat of the uncompleted revolution opened the way to the neo-absolutism of the 1850s, another subject which will be addressed later in the present volume.33 30 For the Hungarian point, see also below, p. 260. Wessele ńyi: Evans, ‘Austrian Identity’, 31 See below, pp. 253–5. 27–8. 32 Cf. below, p. 256. 33 See below, ch. 15.

204


As we shall see there, this vigorous, and largely rational system of rule pursued a ruthlessly centralizing agenda, which failed because it was too ambitious: it did not acknowledge its own weaknesses and declined to make concessions, thus missing opportunities to implement less drastic plans. A feature of this absolutism was that it introduced for the first time an Austrian power structure which simultaneously obliterated both Hungarian and Bohemian statehood. The policy manifested itself most sharply in the curtailment of aristocratic authority: in Hungary the Old Conservatives were left on the sidelines; but in Bohemia too, notwithstanding the presence of Felix Schwarzenberg, Leo Thun, and others in an individual capacity, the ancestral mediating influence of the landowning fraternity attenuated. That enhanced the significance of the other ruling stratum we have identified in each kingdom. The Bohemian variant made possible the neo-absolutist experiment; the Hungarian variant destroyed it. Bohemia’s bureaucratic, intellectual, and entrepreneurial class associated itself more and more readily with wider (great-) Austrian goals, but it was already beginning to link these with the increasingly fervent, arrogant, and intolerant national German sentiments characteristic of the mid-century—despite taking into its ranks many native Czech-speakers. A range of attitudes were emerging, but at their extreme stood the distinctive and dangerous ethnic and ideological mix which would come in the next century to be described as ‘Sudeten’.34 Most important from our point of view, they sustained, even emotionally intensified, many of those existing personal, political, and official connections which favoured the career prospects of Bohemians in the Monarchy. Hungary witnessed little cooperation, and hardly even pacification, since the country still depended socially on the county gentry, whose preponderance was actually boosted by the neutralization of the magnates. The great-Austrian state would not have been willing to employ these gentlemen in any case, had they been willing to participate in it. The void was filled by bureaucrats, many of them alien. The bulk came from Bohemia, or at least—a revealing psychological datum—were perceived as such (recent research has clarified the actual profile of the servants of absolutism).35 Finally ‘Czech breeches’ entered the kingdom, in the shape of personnel (and not just the administrative, legal, and other forms introduced by the regime of Alexander Bach at the same time); but ironically these ‘Bach hussars’ actually had to wear a kind of Magyar dress, a tight-fitting, garish, uncomfortable, and costly costume which was supposed to assuage local sensibilities.36 Like other government initiatives of the 1850s it achieved the 34 For the subsequent Sudeten self-perception: Hermann Aubin, Geschichtliche Kra ¨ fte im Sudetenraum (Leipzig, 1941). For a balanced assessment: Jan Krˇen, Konfliktnı´ spolecˇenstvı´: Cˇesˇi a Neˇmci, 1780–1918 (Pr., 1990). 35 Ga ´bor Benedek, ‘Ciszlajtańiai tisztviselo˝k a neoabszolutizmuskori Magyarorsza´gon’, Aetas (1995), no. 4, 60–70; Tama´s To´th, ‘Lajtańtu´li tisztviselo˝k a szolgabı´roí hivatalokban: ta´rsadalomto¨rteńeti vizsga´lo´da´sok a neoabszolutizmuskori ko¨zigazgata´sban’, Sic Itur ad Astra (1995), nos.1–2, 3–42; A´gnes Dea´k, ‘Nemzeti egyenjogusı´ta´s’, esp. 173–84; Helmut Slapnicka, ‘Beamte aus den bo¨hmischen La¨ndern in der Slowakei, 1853–60’, Bohemia, 44 (2003), 488–502. 36 Dea ´k, ‘Nemzeti egyenjogusı´ta´s’, 160; cf. below, ch. 15, n. 60.

Empire and Kingdoms

205

opposite effect, and contributed to the ignominious dismissal of Bach and his colleagues in 1859. That restored a degree of political latitude not only to Hungary, but to Bohemia as well. The following year brought a further interesting turn in Hungarian–Bohemian mutual relations. Francis Joseph rediscovered his traditional feudal ruling partners. He summoned an advisory body, the Reichsrat, within which the aristocracy dominated: on the Hungarian side the Old Conservatives; on the Austrian side the Bohemian magnates. The two groups were already linked: for instance, the Bohemian leader, Heinrich Jaroslav Clam-Martinitz, was the son of the first woman Istvań Szećhenyi had aspired to marry; Antal Forgaćh, one of the few Hungarian titled nobles to hold office during the 1850s, had been posted to Prague and made many contacts there. They discussed an arrangement whereby Hungary’s organs of self-government would be exported as the building blocks of a federalist Monarchy. This programme was then briefly realized with the proclamation of the so-called October Diploma. Never in the past had representatives of the two countries’ ruling elites worked so closely together; nor would they do so again in the future.37 Ten years earlier their solution might still have been feasible—that depends in part whether we believe that Hungary’s magnates retained their political and social preponderance until 1848–9, and how we evaluate the position of the Bohemian aristocracy vis-a`-vis the nascent Czech national cause.38 But time had by now run out on any such high-born deals.

Over recent decades Hungarian historians have radically reassessed the 1867 Compromise, recognizing that from the Transleithanian perspective—as those who negotiated it maintained—it represented a broadly logical and advantageous resolution of the ko¨zjogi ke´rde´s, the ‘imperial problem’ faced by Habsburg rulers. Similarly welcome have been the attempts, albeit as yet only isolated ones, to understand the Monarchy’s political evolution through the 1860s on both sides of the Leitha at the same time, since they interacted in a variety of ways.39 It is easy to forget, alongside the intellectual effervescence of Hungary’s public 37 Clam seems still to await his historian. On Forga ćh: Dea´k, ‘Nemzeti egyenjogu´sı´ta´s’, 183, 316, 318, and cf. below, ch. 14, n. 41. For the linkages, see Vilmos Heiszler in Sz. 119 (1985), 750–71. 38 Hungary: cf. La ´szlo´ Pe´ter in SEER, 70 (1992), 77–110. Bohemia: cf. Ralph Melville, Adel und ¨ sterreich um die Mitte des Revolution in Bo¨hmen: Strukturwandel von Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in O 19. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1998). Much disparaging evidence in Josef V. Polisˇensky´, Aristocrats and the Crowd in the Revolutionary Year 1848: A Contribution to the History of Revolution and CounterRevolution in Austria (Albany, NY, 1979). 39 Pe ´ter Hana´k, Ungarn in der Donaumonarchie: Probleme der bu¨rgerlichen Umgestaltung eines Vielvo¨lkerstaates (V., 1984); Jo´zsef Galańtai, A Habsburg-monarchia alkonya: osztra´k-magyar dualizmus, 1867–1918 (Bp., 1985). E´va Somogyi, A birodalmi centralizaćio´to´l a dualizmusig, az osztra´k-ne´met libera´lisok u´tja a kiegyeze´shez (Bp., 1976); there is also a slightly modified German edn., Vom Zentralismus zum Dualismus . . . (Bp., 1983). J. Garamvo¨lgyi (ed.), Quellen zur Genesis des ungarischen Ausgleichsgesetzes von 1867: Der o¨sterreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich von 1867 (Mun., 1979).

206


¨ ffentlichkeit was far more novel elsewhere life in those years, that a political O in the Habsburg lands, where constitutionality now came into being for the first time—apart from the fleeting and bitter experiences of 1848–9—with a reasonably wide suffrage, and with forums which extended down to the local level, as the commune (Gemeinde, obec) grew, under the impact of liberal laws, into a semi-democratic institution. In Bohemia, where rapid economic and social changes had already begun under the previous regime, this proceeded most conspicuously, and the czechophone population suddenly came of age. In the aftermath of the collapse of neo-absolutism and the unworkability of the Diploma, Francis Joseph introduced a Patent in February 1861, which provided for all the assemblies or diets of the various crownlands to elect to a central parliament (still described as a Reichsrat) for the whole Monarchy. Thus both the nationalities of Bohemia were represented in Vienna. The Magyars, however, and Hungary as a whole, refused to participate at all: they thereby found themselves, after the dissolution of their own diet later in 1861, in the invidious and unprecedented position of enjoying less collective liberty than the rest of the Habsburgs’ subjects. This oppositional stance attracted some sympathy among the Czechs, who soon decided that their claims were insufficiently recognized by the Germanic element still dominant both at the centre and in the Bohemian localities. Under the Patent the Empire was ruled against the Magyars, and also against the Czechs; but Bohemia’s Germans were placed in a crucial strategic position—indeed it was precisely the rise of a strong Slav movement there which galvanized these proto-Sudetens into a heightened ethnic awareness and a tougher political stance.40 The Patent laid too narrow a foundation, and in 1865 the Emperor experimented with further constitutional measures. It is a familiar story that he entered into serious negotiations with the Hungarian opposition, but often overlooked that at the same time he bargained with their Bohemian counterparts, no less sincerely. The federalist plans of his new premier, the Moravian Count Richard Belcredi, at once looked back towards the Old-Conservative Diploma and adumbrated the possibility of a feudal-bourgeois Czech alliance.41 Inter alia Belcredi raised the prospect of a coronation in Bohemia too. As the lineaments of the Compromise took final shape, after the Austro-Prussian war, Belcredi still possessed enough authority to summon an extraordinary imperial assembly which was to pass judgement on the great constitutional transaction. This außerordentlicher Reichsrat never in fact convened. The liberal diplomat Beust, brought in from Germany, changed Francis Joseph’s mind at the last 40 Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981). 41 Zdene ˇk V. Tobolka, Politicke´ deˇjiny ˇceskoslovenske´ho na´roda od r. 1848 azˇ do dnesˇnı´ doby (4 vols. Pr., 1932–7), ii. 82–135; Arthur Zimprich, ‘Belcredis Versuche einer Fo¨deralisierung der Donaumonarchie, 1865–7’, Ungarn-Jahrbuch, 1 (1969), 99–138. Cf. also Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, passim, and in gen. below, pp. 289 f.

Empire and Kingdoms

207

moment. But besides Beust, Gyula Andra´ssy also acquired decisive influence. His antipathy towards Slavs embodied the prejudices of the Magyar nobility and chimed with attitudes among the Bohemian Germans.42 Moreover, his significance on the morrow of Ko¨niggra¨tz differed markedly from that of Hungary’s representatives sixty years earlier, after Austerlitz, the previous great Habsburg defeat on Bohemian soil; just as it differed from the Hungarians’ peripheral role some sixty years before that, when the Monarchy had to be regenerated in the wake of the preceding disaster suffered by the Habsburgs at the hands of a German rival. In the event the basic document of the Compromise simply took the form of a Hungarian law, which a tamed Austrian parliament had almost willy-nilly to ratify—and without any participation by the disgruntled Czechs. Thus 1867 proved a great milestone. But it is not quite a terminus for the present reflections. Hungary gained self-government (not sovereignty), roughly the package of ‘Home Rule’, which Irish and other provincial causes—as they were viewed from the centre—began to demand from the British imperial authorities towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Furthermore Hungary could at last lay claim to a real say in the common affairs of the Monarchy.43 Bohemia lost out in this latter connection too, as the influence of her aristocracy gradually waned and her bureaucratic heritage was worn down by tensions over nationality. But the political aspirations of the Czech majority now focused firmly on the Compromise itself. Their first reaction was an outbreak of rage, memorably articulated by the aged and now fiercely Magyarophobe Palacky´; then they launched a (for the moment) concerted campaign for similar concessions to be made to the lands of the Bohemian crown.44 In 1871, impelled by renewed upheaval abroad, Francis Joseph again named a Moravian magnate as his Austrian premier and embarked upon substantive talks with Czech leaders. It is customary to call these Hohenwart negotiations an attempt at ‘trialism’, but in reality they would have amounted rather to a Hungaro-Bohemian dualism. Again success appeared to be within grasp, but the same two factors frustrated it as four years earlier: the German side, which associated the fate of the ‘Sudetens’ with that of their co-nationals in the rest of Austria (there were demonstrations even in Germany); and the Magyars, above all in the person of Andra´ssy, who opposed Bohemian state rights with all the power he could muster.45 Whether respect for such rights would have been so 42

Cf. below, p. 260. E´va Somogyi, Kormańyzati rendszer a dualista Habsburg Monarchia´ban (Bp., 1996); ead. in Sz., 138 (2004), 601–72. 44 Kor ˇalka, Frantisˇek Palacky´, 447 ff.; cf. above, p. 98. On the campaign of passive resistance: Jaroslav Pursˇ, ‘Ta´bory v cˇeskyćh zemıćh, 1868–71’, CˇsCˇH, 6 (1958), 234–66, 446–70, 661–90. Cf. Garver, Young Czech Party, 49 ff. 45 Tobolka, Politicke ´ deˇjiny, ii.199–285; Rudolf Wierer in Bohemia, 4 (1963), 54–173; Christian Scharf, Ausgleichspolitik und Pressekampf in der A¨ra Hohenwart: die Fundamentalartikel von 43

208


harmful to Hungary’s interests is less clear—though again external linkage, in this case the impact of prospective gains by the Czechs on the situation of their own quasi-co-nationals, the Slovaks, played its part. At all events the outcome of the Hohenwart, or Czech, compromise attempt, while it strengthened the newly established dualism in the Monarchy, showed too that Bohemia’s parity of status could not be left out of the equation. Her constitutional grievance, which already by the end of the sixties was so closely aligned to the Hungarian model, remained an open wound on the body of the Austro-Hungarian state until the end of the empire. Only now once more—for the wheel has turned full circle—we cannot talk of an ‘empire’, since the Magyars protested against any further use of the term to describe the Habsburg realms. Thus in the ‘age of imperialism’ the oldest imperial family strictly speaking possessed no empire (unless Hungary herself could now be viewed as such).46 I conclude with a recapitulation of the main line of argument. Our two kingdoms, which together determined the future of the Monarchy, contained two upper social and political layers, two aristocracies. They did not differ greatly from each other, and they took their share in similar fashion with the running of the empire as a whole; but the Hungarian one integrated more slowly and reservedly. Below the level of the magnates lay two more ruling strata: one of these, the Bohemian, readily assimilated; whereas the other, the Hungarian, hardly did so. Nationalism strengthened the attitude of the latter, while it split the former in two. But the German element was potent enough to vanquish Bohemian separatism—at least for the time being—just as its Hungarian equivalent came good. What if the aristocracy had been able to maintain its dominance a little longer? Or if Magyars and Czechs had collaborated in a joint national interest against Vienna? Or if Hungary and Bohemia had been able to come together in a real common cause at an earlier stage? Such hypothetical questions are worth pondering, so that we can better judge the actual power struggles in Central Europe and their outcomes.

1871 und der deutsch-tschechische Konflikt in Bo¨hmen (Mun., 1996); Istvań Dio´szegi, Bismarck és Andra´ssy: Magyarorsza´g a ne´met hatalmi politika´ban a XIX. sza´zad ma´sodik fele´ben (Bp., 1998), 115–42. 46 Gerald Stourzh, in Innere Staatsbildung und gesellschaftliche Modernisierung in O ¨ sterreich und Deutschland, 1867/71 bis 1914, ed. H. Rumpler (V./Mun., 1991), 53–68, and id. in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Rumpler and Urbanitsch, vii. 1183 ff., on the decline of ‘Reich’ terminology. There is a need for study of the usage of ‘birodalom’ in Hungary.

12 The Transylvanian Saxons: A German Diaspora Since the end of the Vo¨lkerwanderung the Germans have been a markedly mobile people. Though continuously settled in a ‘homeland’ of sorts, they migrated from it in large numbers, notably in the High Middle Ages, when massive German colonization of substantial parts of East-Central Europe took place, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a more quantifiable number of emigrants—perhaps close on ten million in total—moved abroad, partly, once more, to areas further east, but particularly to North America. This essay examines that evolution in the currently fashionable context of ‘diaspora’: a group living physically separate from some ‘home’ community (or just from others of its kind), yet still in a degree of symbiosis with it (or them). German emigrants rarely sought, still less sustained, such an identity, most either remaining in contiguity with the heartlands of settlement or else assimilating into their new environment quickly, successfully, and with little apparent regret. The community of German migrants which best deserves description as a ‘diaspora’ is probably the Saxons of Transylvania, who acquired distinctive political, jurisdictional, and ecclesiastical privileges in the kingdom of Hungary which they jealously protected for over six centuries, sufficiently powerful and autonomous to develop a strong national consciousness, yet sufficiently remote from other Germans to feel essentially self-reliant. The advent of Lutheranism confirmed both the self-identity of the Saxons and their cultural links with Protestant Germany. In the modern period, threats to the status of the Saxons caused them to stress their association with Germandom at large: at first mainly by virtue of their links with the Habsburg Emperors; later more by direct emulation of the Protestant north. Only in the twentieth century did the heartland come to take much notice of the Saxons or develop a vocabulary to describe such Auslandsdeutsche; but the First World War and Nazi policies only hastened the collapse of consciously German communities abroad.

Diasporas are in vogue. From the original use of the term, with its biblical credentials, to describe historic communities of Jews scattered in gentile realms, the concept has been extended to other peoples and come to be much invoked in discussions of migration, cultural exchange, ethnic minorities, alienation, and so forth. Yet it is not an easy notion on which to focus, nor may it appear to be one readily applicable in the case of the Germans: though a most numerous and Unpublished; first drafted in 1992 for a series on diasporas, held at Oxford.

210


mobile people, they have arguably generated only a small true diaspora. In order to clarify the terms of the analysis which follows, I venture to begin with a model from the realm of historical sociology. Agrarian populations near the geographical limits of viable land use have frequently developed a form of settlement involving, on the one hand, permanent farms or homesteads based in the village and, on the other, isolated outposts further up the mountainside or out in the plain. The latter, and perhaps also the former, would come to bear generic names, as with the Norwegian saeter, the Scots shieling, or the Welsh pair hafod and hendre. Arrangements of this kind could remain stable over many years, even centuries, when they represented mere seasonal movement of labour: the words hafod (‘summer dwelling’), by contrast with hendre (‘old home’), speak for themselves. They could also be stabilized in equal degree—the process was a commonplace of medieval times—if the outpost became a place of permanent abode and cut its organic links with the ‘old home’. But there might arise an intermediate situation, where those subsisting beyond the pale of regular settlement still lived according to the rhythms of their original domicile, while retaining little or no physical contact with it. Such, for example, was the system of tanyas on the Great Hungarian Plain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 And such perhaps, mutates mutandis, is the condition of ‘diaspora’ for ethnic groups as a whole, at least for those which possess a definite homeland as the central point of cultural reference. From an early stage in their history the Germans evidently had a homeland, even if the Holy Roman Empire, which a substantial majority of them inhabited, was neither clear-cut geographically nor altogether determinate politically.2 Yet this ‘Germany’ also brought forth remarkably large numbers of emigrants, over a very long span of time. We need to review the two great periods of German mobility, in medieval and modern times, and to examine their implications for the identity of those involved, in order to establish how far the term ‘diaspora’ may be relevant and helpful here. I can essay only the sketchiest introduction to the broader subject, although I shall hope to show that the elements of genuine diaspora within it are strictly limited, and that reference to Hungary in the preceding paragraph was not entirely fortuitous. Germans were not just key participants in the dark-age Vo¨lkerwanderung, to which (in distant retrospect, of course) they gave the name; they became the greatest migrants of the Christian Middle Ages. From the ninth century onwards the centre of gravity of the Empire gradually but continuously shifted eastwards. Among ambitious rulers—emperors at first, then mainly territorial princes—we may speak of a Drang nach Osten, a conscious process of political expansion. This overlapped with a dynamic programme of Christian mission, led by archbishops The classic analysis is Ferenc Erdei, Magyar tanya´k (Bp., 1942). Cf., on the important question of borders, Deutschlands Grenzen in der Geschichte, ed. A. Demandt (Mun., 1990), and my reflections in ch. 7 above. 1 2

The Transylvanian Saxons

211

of Bremen, Magdeburg, and Salzburg and by many lesser prelates, which was subsequently consolidated through the activities of religious orders, especially the Cistercians and Premonstratensians. But the essence of the enterprise, for our purposes, lay in a Zug nach Osten, a trek to the east, by many thousands of individual peasants and artisans who felt the pressures of overpopulation in their native region and looked to economic and social betterment in a new home. They participated in a movement which was quite voluntary and uncoordinated as a whole, except for the links which might be established between particular entrepreneurs (known as locatores) and the settlers they sought to attract to a given estate or township.3 Frontiers—both of the Empire and of new or enlarged principalities within it—followed haltingly in the wake of these changes. Saxony, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, and Austria were occupied by the twelfth century and added to the Reich. Over the next century further advance took place into Pomerania, Bohemia, Silesia, and parts of Hungary, and all those regions except the last came to exhibit varying degrees of adherence to the Empire. Expansion still continued during the fourteenth century, especially into the newly constituted realms of Prussia and Livonia in the north-east. It was finally brought to a halt by a series of debilitating setbacks: the Black Death, which eliminated population surplus in the old motherlands; the wars along the Baltic seaboard between the Teutonic Order and a resurgent Poland; and the Hussite explosion in Bohemia. Given that ethnic tension notoriously formed a principal component in the Hussite wars, we must ask: How ‘Germanic’ or ‘Germanizing’ was this whole evolution of settlement patterns in the east of medieval Europe? The question is impossible to answer satisfactorily: special factors operated in the case of early fifteenth-century Bohemia, and what evidence we possess of earlier German– Slav relations remains exiguous and inconsistent.4 For most colonists the issue would hardly have arisen. On the whole they occupied blocks of territory contiguous to existing German lands, and must have possessed much the same kind of (highly restricted) self-identity as other denizens of the Reich, even if they lived just outside its confines. Moreover, the balance sheet of ethnic and 3 Good general treatment in Charles Higounet, Die deutsche Ostsiedlung im Mittelalter (Ger. trans., Mun., 1990); convenient sketch by Martyn Rady in The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on the History of their Social, Cultural and Political Relations, ed. R. Bartlett and K. Scho¨nwa¨lder (L., 1999). Some of the volumes in Siedler Verlag’s major series on all the lands of German settlement in the east of Europe, entitled ‘Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas’ (10 vols., Berlin, 1992–9), have proved controversial. Individual titles are: Ost- und Westpreußen, ed. H. Boockmann; Bo¨hmen und Ma¨hren, ed. F. Prinz; Baltische La¨nder, ed. G. von Pistohlkors; Schlesien, ed. N. Conrads; Galizien, ed. I. Ro¨skau-Rydel; Land an der Donau, ed. G. Scho¨dl; Land der großen Stro¨me, ed. J. Rogall; Pommern, ed. W. Buchholz; Rußland, ed. G. Stricker; Zwischen Adria und Karawanken, ed. A. Suppan. There is a helpful overall introduction to all aspects of German migration in Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in Deutschland: Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. K. J. Bade (Mun., 1992). 4 Higounet, Deutsche Ostsiedlung, 217 f., 320, 331, 336. For the Bohemian case, see Frantisˇek Sˇmahel, Idea na´roda v husitskyćh Cˇechaćh (2nd edn., Pr., 2000).

212


cultural consolidation, whereby majority populations tended to assimilate minorities, served to confirm that picture, and not always to the Germans’ advantage: whereas the German element came to dominate at Breslau, as in the whole province of Silesia, at Cracow it was progressively subsumed within a Polish burgherdom. Migrants to the east certainly brought with them some important Germanic accessories. The peasants ploughed with what the sources describe as an aratrum teutonicale, and their husbandry was closely associated with the spread of the three-field system and of wine-growing. They enjoyed the protection of the ius teutonicale—legal privileges were, indeed, a prime incentive in recruiting them. Urban settlements buttressed themselves more specifically with the laws and the jurisdiction of Lu¨beck, Magdeburg, or Nuremberg, and employed distinctive architectural forms. So did the church, many of whose personnel in the earlier stages, particularly the monks, were clearly German. Yet all this was a very loose and largely unconscious ‘Germanness’, highly miscellaneous in background— not all the original settlers were even German-speaking—and much diluted by native populations, which could quickly espouse the same forms of living and enjoy the same advantages as the newcomers. Only nineteenth-century commentators would add national or nationalist coloration to this canvas of widespread ethnic innocence; but we should note that the first rediscoverers of the German medieval migrations, the Enlightenment historians of the years just before 1800, saw in them, by an equal and opposite misinterpretation, only plunder and destruction.5

In terms of the paradigm introduced at the outset of the present chapter, the vast majority of these colonists thus represented no kind of diaspora. Either they continued to be attached securely to the homeland, whether or not they were formally subjects of the Empire; or they gravitated definitively into some other kind of allegiance. Only in parts of Hungary did things take a different course. The Hungarian state established by King Stephen in the years around 1000 was an altogether distinct and self-contained polity; but it stood in the cultural shadow of the Empire, with which it entertained for the most part good diplomatic relations. Immigrant ‘guests’ (hospites) who could contribute to the country’s advancement were therefore welcome, and most of them came from Germany. Besides performing important economic tasks as farmers, traders, and especially miners, and deploying a foreign training in the Church or at court, hospites also served the needs of defence, notably as frontier guards. Hence German settlements in Hungary were at once both widely dispersed and yet 5 Higounet, Deutsche Ostsiedlung, 14; cf. the observations in August L. Schlo ¨ zer, Kritische Sammlungen zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbu¨rgen (3 vols., Go¨ttingen, 1795–7; repr. Cologne/V., 1979), i, Vorrede.


213

densely concentrated in certain localities. And they enjoyed particularly extensive privileges from their protectors, the kings of the native house of A´rpa´d. German penetration of Hungary suffered one dramatic false start. The young Teutonic Order, introduced by Andrew II in 1211 into Transylvania, the eastern march of the country, in order to hold back advancing Cumanian tribes, soon fell foul of the King, who banished it again thirteen years later when he recognized the danger of the knights’ insubordination. Yet that episode did no harm to the rest of the colonists; indeed, it actually enhanced the position of the socalled Saxons, sundry settlers from various parts of the Reich who had moved into adjacent areas of Transylvania since the mid-twelfth century, and whom Andrew now regarded as a counterweight to the turbulent knights. In the same year, 1224, the King issued a major codification and extension of existing royal grants to about 200 communities of Saxons. This document, known as the Andreanum, or to the local Germans as their ‘Goldener Freibrief’, was subsequently renewed no less than twenty-two times. It established the Saxon lands as a Ko¨nigsboden, or ‘terrain of the king’, whose inhabitants constituted a separate people under separate royal judges (Ko¨nigsrichter), liable to one collective annual tax only (500 marks of silver, in the first instance), and fulfilling certain fixed military obligations (500 soldiers for service inside Hungary, or 100 outside). The Saxons gained the right to free choice of all their priests and to a single ecclesiastical organization, which by the end of the Middle Ages was largely independent of the Hungarian episcopate.6 Given such a flying start, the Saxons of Transylvania flourished, both as efficient agriculturalists and as traders who could profit particularly from the long-distance commerce overland between Central Europe and the Near East. They occupied a substantial band of the best land in the south of the province, together with a significant outlier further north known as the No¨snerland, around Bistritz. Their cities grew to respectable size: Kronstadt numbered about 10,000 inhabitants by 1500, Hermannstadt about 8,000, and Scha¨ssburg and Bistritz some 5,000 each. Their communities, grouped into semi-autonomous districts described usually as Stu¨hle (‘seats’; in Hungarian sze´kek), became amalgamated as a genuine ‘nation’ in the medieval sense: a corporate legal and cultural Universitas Saxonum Transylvaniae. The latter was empowered to take collective decisions under its senior elected official, the Ko¨nigsrichter of Hermannstadt, who from the fifteenth century bore the title of Count of the Saxons (comes Saxonum).7 6 Geschichte der Deutschen auf dem Gebiete Ruma ¨ niens, vol. i: 12. Jahrhundert bis 1848, ed. C. Go¨llner (Buch., 1979). The Andreanum and other fundamental medieval documents of the Saxons are printed in Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbu¨rgen, ed. F. Zimmermann et al. (4 vols., Hermannstadt, 1892–1937). The most recent general history of the Saxons, with useful bibliography, is Konrad Gu¨ndisch, Siebenbu¨rgen und die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen (Mun., 1998). 7 The seven original Stu ¨ hle around Hermannstadt, which dated from the early fourteenth century, were later joined by two more. The area further east, around Kronstadt, and the detached area to the north, around Bistritz, were constituted as Distrikte, but administered in essentially the

214


How ‘German’ were these settlers in the outermost marches of the zone of European colonization, as then understood? They sustained regular commercial contacts with the Empire: that is demonstrated, for example, by the fortunes of the Haller family, patricians of Nuremberg who also became important citizens on the Ko¨nigsboden. By the sixteenth century we have evidence of journeymen travelling from Germany to Transylvania and vice versa. Saxon students made their way westwards to university in Cracow or Vienna; Germans from the Reich are recorded in the school at Kronstadt. There are some signs of literary links, and occasionally of political engagement: Saxons gave brief support for a German candidate to the Hungarian throne in 1305; they readily cooperated with Sigismund, who was simultaneously king of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor for almost forty years from 1400.8 Yet any marked ethnic selfconsciousness appears to be absent: no medieval writer is known to have chronicled the res gestae of the Saxon people. On the whole we find in Transylvania typically German forms of town government and ordered communal life, of architecture and social activity, and so forth, which run parallel with what could be found in the distant ‘motherland’, but which generate, for the time being, no special emotional charge. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the flow of Germans abroad ebbed to a trickle. Specialist workers might be lured away by foreign employers, like the miners who came to exploit the resources of northern England and Wales in Tudor times. The German colonies in eastern Europe ceased to grow, though their stagnation may conceal movement below the surface, as pressures on the remoter and more isolated settlements to assimilate to the local environment were balanced by the continual, albeit sporadic, arrival of new immigrants, especially in the towns.9 Contact in the other direction, from Hungary’s German communities to the Empire, certainly remained vigorous. Not only did numerous individuals take up temporary residence in Germany, notably students with municipal bursaries; but some remained there permanently, among them (it appears) the ancestors of both Albrecht Du¨rer and J. S. Bach.10 same way. Some Saxons did not live on the Ko¨nigsboden at all, and these—cf. the example of Klausenburg below—gradually lost their German speech and nationality. All Saxon place-names in this chapter, as is appropriate to its subject matter, are rendered in their German forms only; for other equivalents, see the Index. 8 Evans, Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 269 and n. (Hallers). Geschichte der Deutschen, ed. Go¨llner, 77 (journeymen), 147 (Kronstadt school), 139 (literature), 63 (1305 episode). For the students: Sańdor Tonk, Erde´lyiek egyetemja´ra´sa a ko¨ze´pkorban (Buch., 1979). For Sigismund: Eleme´r Ma´lyusz, Kaiser Sigismund in Ungarn, 1387–1437 (Bp., 1990). 9 M. B. Donald, Elizabethan Copper: The History of the Company of Mines Royal, 1568–1605 (L., 1955); cf. Daniel Hechstetter the Younger, Memorabilia and Letters, 1600–39, ed. G. Hammersley (Stuttgart, 1988). The mobility of German urban populations in eastern Europe is suggested by material in Valjavec, Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen, vols. ii–iii, but needs confirmation. 10 Interesting evidence about German students from the Upper Hungarian town of Leutschau is now provided in Lo˝csei stipendiańsok és litera´tusok: ku¨lfo¨ldi tanulmańyutak dokumentumai, 1550–1699, ed. T. Katona and M. Latzkovits (Szeged, 1990). Du¨rer’s father, who apparently took


215

Two particular circumstances confirmed the nascent self-identity of the Transylvanian Saxons during this time. The first was the Lutheran Reformation, whose conquest of the Ko¨nigsboden owed much to the ecclesiastical autonomy which the region already enjoyed. Introduced by Johann Honterus in the 1540s, the new creed soon gained firm institutional status and made a powerful cultural impact, above all in education: by 1660 the 238 Saxon parishes maintained 224 schools, a remarkable high figure by contemporary standards.11 Elsewhere in Hungary and other easterly parts of the continent, of course, Lutheranism proved successful among local Germans; but only in Transylvania, where it came to embrace the Saxons—town dwellers and peasants alike—almost to a man, but none of the non-Saxon population, did it contribute so decisively to the formation of an ethno-linguistic allegiance. A second factor proved equally crucial: the evolution, in the aftermath of Ottoman aggression, of a separate Transylvanian state on the ruins of the medieval Hungarian polity. The constitution of this new, or reordered, land rested on a union of three ‘nations’ (Hungarians, Szeklers, Saxons) and—from the 1560s—of four religions (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and Unitarian). Thus the Saxon Universitas gained a share in power which derived both from national privilege and from ecclesiastical right, and from the two inseparably, since by the mid-sixteenth century, as we have seen, they coincided. At the same time the Saxons needed to defend their political position very consciously, not only against external threats from the Turks just across the mountains to the south, but against the dominant Hungarian–Szekler interest within the Transylvanian establishment. The fate of the city of Klausenburg, formerly a Saxon settlement located outside the Ko¨nigsboden, served as a warning: it became the country’s de facto capital, but in the process mutated into a stronghold of Magyardom, and a focus for Calvinists and Unitarians, rather than Lutherans—another facet of the area’s progressive ethnic-cum-religious diversification.12 The modus vivendi through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries between the Saxon people and the Hungarian princes and nobles of Transylvania proved his name from a village called Ajto´s (Hung. ‘ajto´’ ¼ ‘door’ ¼ ‘Tu¨r’), left Hungary for Nuremberg in 1455: Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Du¨rer (Princeton, 1955), 4. Veit Bach is regarded by Johann Sebastian, in his MS ‘Ursprung der musicalisch-Bachischen Familie’, as the family’s ancestor, and said there to have come from Hungary, probably from in or near Pressburg, though the matter remains moot. Cf. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. S. Sadie (20 vols., London, 1980), i. 774–82, esp.781. 11 Erich Roth, Die Reformation in Siebenbu ¨ rgen (2 vols., Cologne/Graz, 1962–4). Oskar Wittstock, Johannes Honterus, der Siebenbu¨rger Humanist und Reformator (Go¨ttingen, 1970). Geschichte der Deutschen, ed. Go¨llner, 340, for schools. 12 The standard work is now Erde ´ly to¨rteńete, ed. B. Ko¨peczi et al. (3 vols., Bp., 1986), i. 409 ff., also available in English as History of Transylvania (3 vols., Boulder, Colo., 2001–2); and conveniently abbreviated as Kurze Geschichte Siebenbu¨rgens, ed. B. Ko¨peczi et al. (Bp., 1990), 243 ff. For the culture of Klausenburg/Kolozsva´r, cf. Be´la Pukańszky, Erde´lyi sza´szok és magyarok (Pećs, 1943), 38 ff.

216


an uneasy one, punctuated by years of devastating conflict in the middle, around 1600, and further disturbed by episodes at the beginning and the end of the period when Saxon leaders sought the backing of the Austrian Habsburgs.13 Links between the Ko¨nigsboden and Germany correspondingly intensified, and they now centred on the Lutheran universities, seminaries for generation after generation of Saxon pastors. Students went especially to Wittenberg, where twenty Transylvanians arrived in 1686 alone, to Jena and to Leipzig. Among them were significant figures like Bartholomaeus Baussner, who made his name as a medical author before returning home to serve as bishop, the senior ecclesiastical dignitary among the Saxons. At the same time historical awareness was fed by a series of more or less fanciful accounts of Saxon origins, all published abroad and debating their supposedly autochthonous descent from the Goths or some other pristine Teutonic race.14

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed renewed and much intensified German migration, now not only to the east but also to the west, the latter a phenomenon so dramatic that it demands our attention first. By the time of the American War of Independence, some quarter of a million Germans had already settled in the Colonies, fully half of them in Pennsylvania, where—as if to afford us a link, however tenuous, with the preceding discussion—one of the first and most notable was the poet and ‘hermit of the Wissahickon’, Johann Kelpius, a Transylvanian Saxon. By the 1750s Germans constituted about a third of the population of Pennsylvania, sufficient to arouse the anxieties of Benjamin Franklin as to their adaptability, even their loyalty. That proved, in the event, not to be in question, though the Germans may, indeed, have taken some time to comprehend American ideals both of freedom and of unfreedom: some of their early spokesmen were deeply critical of slavery.15 13 For the attitude of comes Markus Pemfflinger in the 1520s and 1530s, see Erde ´ly to¨rteńete, ed. Ko¨peczi et al., i. 415, 460, 463. For the attitude of comes Johann Sachs von Harteneck just after the end of the Hungarian principality, a premature attempt to undermine Transylvanian noble hegemony which ended in his execution, see Ferdinand Zieglauer, Harteneck und die siebenbu¨rgischen Parteika¨mpfe seiner Zeit (Hermannstadt, 1869). 14 Geschichte der Deutschen, ed. Go ¨ llner, 342, for student numbers. The most important historical contributions were Johannes Tro¨ster, Das alte und neue teutsche Dacia (Nuremberg, 1660), Lorenz To¨ppelt, Origines et occasus Transylvaniae (Lyons, 1667), and Valentin Franck von Franckenstein, Origines nationum et praecipue Saxonicae in Transylvania (Helmstedt, 1697). Cf. Edit Szegedi, Geschichtsbewußtsein und Gruppenidentita¨t: Die Historiographie der Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen zwischen Barock und Aufkla¨rung (Cologne, 2002). 15 America and the Germans: An Assessment of a 300-Year History, ed. F. Trommler and J. McVeigh (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1985), i. 3–13 (Marianne Wokeck), 85–105 (Hermann Wellenreuther); Deutsche im Ausland, 135 ff.; Andreas Brinck, Die deutsche Auswanderungswelle in die britischen Kolonien Nordamerikas um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1993); H. Lehmann (ed.), In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in 18th-Century Europe and America (University Park, Penn, 2000). On Kelpius, see The Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius, ed. J. F. Sachse (Lancaster, Pa., 1917); cf. Julius F. Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1895), 219 ff.


217

After a lull during the Napoleonic wars, this process was resumed and its scope massively expanded, especially from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Between 1815 and the First World War over five million settlers reached the United States from Germany alone (excluding Austria and other neighbouring areas); in 1910 nine million ‘native speakers’ of German were registered there. Yet global figures of that kind are misleading, for the influx was distinguished more by its essential heterogeneity and spontaneity—visions of planned colonization nursed by some visionaries at home always petered out in practice. German immigrants were divided one from another in at least three important ways. First they differed, particularly before the advent of the unitary Second Empire in 1871, in their territories of origin: whereas the majority long came from lands along the Rhine, a former denizen of the Dutch border had little in common with an expatriate Swiss; while by 1900 the mass of new settlers arrived from miscellaneous provinces further east. Moreover, the destinations of Germans were likewise disparate: they quickly spread all over the Midwest as well as along the whole Atlantic seaboard north from Maryland. Secondly, given the character of contemporary spoken German, the dialects of these immigrants were correspondingly multifarious, perhaps mutually unintelligible—and we must bear in mind that many of them spoke only dialect. Finally, there is the factor of confessional diversity, a factor whose significance could only be enhanced by the rigid sectarianism of some of the most determined and ethnically conscious incomers.16 The result of all this was a conspicuously low level of ethnic awareness. Despite the vigorous efforts of a group of politicized emigre´s who fled to America in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, any coalescence into conscious ‘Germanness’ within the United States could only be of a thoroughly transatlantic kind. In Pennsylvania most existing German settlers had become bilingual by the early nineteenth century, and their example was decisive for subsequent arrivals. Whereas it proved possible to create there a single dialect (often confusingly known as ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’), which at its peak about 1880 was spoken by 600,000 people within the state, High German fell into oblivion—with obvious consequences for wider communication—and German language rights were never seriously pressed at the official level.17 At most, immigrants looked to sustain the German component within a pluralist American identity—the language of the ‘melting-pot’ (Schmelztiegel) seems to have originated in those circles as early as 1857. Industrial workers too, many of whom, especially in Chicago, had a German background, were content to 16 America and the Germans, ed. Trommler and McVeigh, i. 14–24 (Gu ¨ nter Moltmann), 25–38 (Agnes Bretting); Marcus L. Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860 (Camb., Mass., 1940), 72 ff., 120 ff., 185 ff., 211 ff., 284 ff.; Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816–85 (Camb., Mass., 1964); Deutsche im Ausland, ed. Bade, 148 ff. For attempts at plantation, see Stefan von Senger und Etterlin, Neudeutschland in Nordamerika: Massenauswanderung, nationale Gruppenansiedlungen und liberale Kolonialbewegung, 1815–60 (Baden-Baden, 1991). 17 America and the Germans, ed. Trommler and McVeigh, i. 41–65 (Donald Yoder), 66–84 (Stephanie G. Wolf), 223–40 (Ju¨rgen Eichhoff), dispelling some legends on this score.

218


accommodate to a predominantly Anglo-Saxon ethos. We should remember how very far from the European motherland, by land as well as sea, such American Germans actually were, or felt themselves to be. Even the sudden wave of enthusiasm in the New World which greeted the triumphs of 1870–1 soon gave way, not merely to renewed unconcern, but to increasingly critical assessments of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine Reich.18 During this period Germans also settled in some numbers elsewhere in the west: in Brazil, for example, and in the United Kingdom. But for further evidence of large-scale colonization we need to turn once again to the east. A renewed Zug nach Osten took several forms after 1700. Mainly under Frederick the Great there was officially inspired internal migration inside Prussia, to lands both within and beyond the formal bounds of the Empire, which involved a total of perhaps 300,000 people.19 More adventurous souls hearkened to the blandishments of Russian rulers and made an international trek, to the lower reaches of the Volga in the 1760s and then to the Black Sea region in the reign of Alexander I. These rural colonists, some 100,000 in all, together with an approximately similar number of urban immigrants to Poland in its era of early industrialization after 1815, joined the Baltic Germans who had become Russian subjects when their territories were conquered by Peter the Great. Thanks to a high birth-rate, especially in villages on the steppes, the population of Germans in the Russian Empire reached 1.8 million by 1900.20 Further south, a parallel but shorter trek took at least 200,000 inhabitants of the Empire to resettle large parts of the Hungarian Plain after the expulsion of the Turks: all of them became known, for no good ethnographic reason, as ‘Swabians’.21 These groups were in many ways akin to the nascent communities of GermanAmericans: most consisted of small farmers, with little education and narrow horizons; they tended to lack cultural or linguistic cohesion; they posed no kind of challenge to the dominant native establishments of the countries they had so recently entered. Even though the prosperous and self-sufficient German settlers 18 America and the Germans, ed. Trommler and McVeigh, i. 131–47 (J. Conzen), with reference to Schmelztiegel, 138; ibid. 189–206 (Hartmut Keil), workers; ibid. 160–75 (Hans L.Trefousse), on attitudes to Germany. See also German Workers’ Culture in the United States, 1850–1920, ed. H. Keil (Washington, DC, 1988). 19 Udo Froese, Das Kolonisationswerk Friedrichs des Großen: Wesen und Verma ¨ chtnis (Heidelberg/ Berlin, 1938). 20 Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich: Zwei Jahrhunderte deutsch-russische Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1986); A. Kappeler et al. (ed.), Die Deutschen im Russischen Reich und im Sowjetstaat (Cologne, 1987); Deutsche im Ausland, ed. Bade, 85 ff.; further literature in J. Long (comp.), The German-Russians: A Bibliography (Santa Barbara/Ox., 1979); convenient summary of the impopulations in German Lands and Eastern Europe, ed. Bartlett and Scho¨nwa¨lder, 91–114 (Roger Bartlett and Bruce Mitchell). Statistics in V. M. Kabuzan, Nemetskoiazychnoe naselenie v Rossiiskoi imperii i SSSR v XVIII–XX vekakh: istoriko-statisticheskoe issledovanie (Moscow, 2003). 21 Schu ¨ sterreichs Bevo¨lkerungspolitik; Die Donauschwaben. Deutsche Siedlung in ¨ nemann, O Su¨dosteuropa, ed. I. Eberl et al. (Sigmaringen, 1987); and many local studies, most recently and massively Karl-Peter Krauss, Deutsche Auswanderer in Ungarn: Ansiedlung in der Herrschaft Bo´ly im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2003). Massive documentation in Quellenbuch, ed. Tafferner.


219

in an arc of southern Russia from Volhynia to the Volga later became suspect to the paranoid authorities in the last phase of tsarism, there is no evidence that they maintained substantive contact with the Reich.22 Against that background, the unique situation of the Transylvanian Saxons qua diaspora now stands out with added clarity: it was matched perhaps only, to some extent, and after 1721, by that of the Baltic Germans, likewise a long-settled Lutheran population, distant but not too distant from the old homeland, capable of sustaining their identity and playing a distinct role in the foreign state to which they now belonged.23 In eighteenth-century Transylvania new immigration made little impact: even the few thousand Austrian Protestants known as ‘Landler’ hardly penetrated the close-knit society of the Saxons, though individuals arriving from Germany could still make their mark, like the artisan father of Daniel Georg Neugeboren, bishop from 1806 to 1822.24 Rather it was tradition which provided fertile soil for the transition to a modern national identity, but which left uncertain whether that identity would involve allegiance basically to the Hungarian, to the Austrian, or to some German state. Eighteenth-century Transylvania formed a separate dominion of the Austrian Monarchy, under the Hungarian crown. The Saxons’ status there still had to be continually reasserted, vis-a`-vis both the local Hungarian nobility and the growing number of Rumanians, who were settled not only in the province as a whole, but as an unprivileged population, roughly equal in numbers to the Saxons, on the Ko¨nigsboden itself. These relationships were now refracted through the new link with the Viennese court, which was ‘German’ in some sense—most evidently in terms of the Habsburgs’ preferred language of administration—but was also associated with the unwelcome pressures of Counter-Reformation and centralization. Henceforth, for at least 150 years, the Saxons tended to expect more from the affiliation with Austria than Austria was ever really disposed to deliver. As the historian Friedrich Teutsch put it (though his words are perhaps more revealing of an early twentieth- than of an eighteenth-century mentality): ‘It was a fateful error that the Saxons constructed for themselves an ideal picture of the Germanness (Deutschtum) of the Viennese court which in reality never existed.’25 22 Exhaustive analyses in Detlef Brandes, Von den Zaren adoptiert: Die deutschen Kolonisten und die Balkansiedler in Neurußland und Bessarabien, 1751–1914 (Mun., 1993); Dietmar Neutatz, Die ‘deutsche Frage’ im Schwarzmeergebiet und in Wolhynien . . . 1856–1914 (Stuttgart, 1993); Victor Do¨nninghaus, Revolution, Reform und Krieg: Die Deutschen an der Wolga im ausgehenden Zarenreich (Essen, 2002). 23 The Baltic Germans were, however, on the one hand more contiguous with co-nationals (in Prussia), and on the other hand more prone to assimilation among the elite, than were Saxons in Hungary. For the prominence of Germans in the highest echelons of the Russian administration and army, see Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen; Victor Do¨nninghaus, Die Deutschen in der Moskauer Gesellschaft: Symbiose und Konflikte (Mun., 2002). 24 Buchinger, ‘Landler’; cf. Raimund F. Kaindl, Geschichte der Deutschen in den Karpathenla ¨ ndern (3 vols., Gotha, 1907–11), iii. 263 ff. Hermann Jekeli, Die Bischo¨fe der ev. Kirche A.B. in Siebenbu¨rgen, vol. i: 1553–1867 (Hermannstadt, 1933; repr. Cologne, 1978), 227 ff. (Neugeboren). 25 Teutsch, Die Siebenbu ¨ rger Sachsen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Hermannstadt, 1924), 123.

220


We can see one facet of the Austrian connection in the career of Samuel Brukenthal (born 1721), who rose as an administrator in Hermannstadt and then in Vienna, achieving particular success as a tax-reformer and cameralist, and became almost the only non-Catholic and non-aristocratic favourite of Maria Theresa. As governor of Transylvania in the 1770s, Brukenthal counted as the first Saxon statesman.26 But a very different facet of the relationship with Austria came to the fore during the reign of Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II. Joseph was received with wild enthusiasm in 1773 when he visited the Ko¨nigsboden, the first king or emperor to do so since 1427—the chief hotel in Hermannstadt, the ‘Turkish Sultan’, was promptly rechristened ‘Roman Emperor’ in his honour. Yet within a few years he had turned against the Saxons as part of his reckless bid for direct and total control over the state: he abolished their communal institutions, including the Universitas, and their privileges, enforcing the principle of so-called concivilitas, whereby non-Saxons could enjoy full liberties on the Ko¨nigsboden. Giving an unpleasant twist to what remained of historic rights, Joseph even insisted on claiming the annual tax stipulated in the Andreanum—though that had now been replaced by other imposts—together with seventy-seven years of back-payment. And he dismissed the protesting Brukenthal for good measure.27

Brukenthal was rebuked by his sovereign as a ‘nationalist’: an episode full of irony, since the Saxons actually resisted Joseph’s law for the introduction of German as the language of administration throughout the Monarchy.28 But Brukenthal had the last laugh when Joseph’s reform movement fell to pieces in 1790. And the events of 1790 represent the real turning point in our story, a moment of intersection between traditional and novel springs of Saxon identity. To evaluate them we need to recall that alternative source of Teutonic patriotism among the Saxons which was sustained by their undiminished links with Lutheran universities in Germany. After the Pietist movement had penetrated to Transylvania—where it provoked controversies that reached the ears of Leibniz and Frederick William I of Prussia—Halle and then Go¨ttingen came to be the preferred destinations. Some prominent Saxons both studied and taught there in the eighteenth century: the historian Martin Schmeizel, for example, or the philosopher Michael Hissmann, according to whom ‘Transylvania is my first and Germany my second fatherland’. They helped transmit the Enlightenment to Transylvania, via such people as the highly cultivated Brukenthal and his freemasonic friends.29 Schuller, Brukenthal, a work already repeatedly cited above; cf. above, pp. 28, 32, 40, 66, 72, 141 f. Marko´, II. Jo´zsef; Angelika Schaser, Josephinische Reformen und sozialer Wandel in Siebenbu¨rgen (Stuttgart, 1989). Cf., for the 1773 visit, Schuller, Brukenthal, i. 281 ff. 28 Schuller, Brukenthal, ii. 180 and passim; Marko ´ , II. Jo´zsef, 67 ff. Cf. above, pp. 141 f. 29 Hermann Jekeli, Quellen zur Geschichte des Pietismus in Siebenbu ¨ rgen (Mediasch, 1924). Carl Go¨llner, in Forschungen zur Volks- und Landeskunde [von Siebenbu¨rgen], iii (1960), 79–97, (Hissmann) quoted at 83. Id. and Stanescu (ed.), Aufkla¨rung; cf. Pukańszky, Erde´lyi sza´szok, 71 ff. 26 27


221

In 1790 the Saxon nation suddenly came alive. On the popular level, Volksfeste celebrated its distinctive culture and heritage, while pamphlets advanced more learned defences of its position. One of these, by a man soon to become bishop, characteristically announced itself as being issued on the occasion of the ‘reanimation of a nation which had been pronounced extinct’.30 Contact was established with the famous Go¨ttingen scholar, August Ludwig Schlo¨zer, who till then, as he freely admitted, ‘knew little more of these Germans than of those in Germantown [Pennsylvania] or Ceylon’, but who quickly worked up an extended publication about the Transylvanian Saxons. Schlo¨zer’s Kritische Sammlungen (1795–7) was a highly scholarly compilation, but his evident admiration for the ‘free state’ (Freistaat), as he termed it, and constitution of the Saxons served to enhance the latter’s self-identity.31 It was perhaps at this time that the appellation ‘Germanissimi Germanorum’, so revealing of their mentality, first came into use. Certainly the local Hungarian political leadership now rounded on the Saxons in a new way: during the fractious Transylvanian diet of 1791 they were warned from the floor that if they did not cooperate, ‘then they could take themselves off to Germany’.32 As yet, however, little changed on the ground. The debates ended in compromise, even though the Saxons effectively lost their veto over new legislation; and the Rumanian problem was not yet serious, even though the principle of concivilitas survived. Moreover, the association with Austria was re-established, indeed reinforced during the ‘quiet years’ (stille Jahre) after 1800, when a Viennese-dominated bureaucracy punctiliously oversaw the maintenance of the status quo, men like Bedeus von Scharberg or Michael von Heydendorff, who had not even attended a German university.33 Whereas the Ko¨nigsboden remained a vanguard by Transylvanian standards—its agricultural yields being three or four times those obtained elsewhere—decades of material stagnation ensued: Kronstadt, which in the early eighteenth century had been the largest town in the whole of Hungary, reached 25,000 inhabitants by 1850, but only one-third of them were Saxons; Hermannstadt numbered 20,000, two-thirds Saxon, at the same date. Real change came in the 1840s. It ran parallel to the simultaneous reform campaigns of Magyars and Rumanians in Vorma¨rz Transylvania, both of the other contributors to this genuinely three-cornered contest being partly at odds 30 Jakob A. Mu ¨ ller, Die siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, herausgegeben bei Auflebung der fu¨r erloschen gehaltenen Nation (Hermannstadt, 1790); see Jekeli, Bischo¨fe, 216 ff. Cf. Schaser, Josephinische Reformen, 196 ff. 31 Schlo ¨ zer, Kritische Sammlungen, esp. i, Vorrede. Schlo¨zer’s most important Saxon colleague was Joseph Carl Eder, editor inter alia of Scriptores Rerum Transsylvanarum (2 vols., Hermannstadt, 32 Zieglauer, Politische Reformbewegung, 304 ff. 1797–1840). 33 Eugen von Friedenfels, Joseph Bedeus von Scharberg (2 vols., V., 1876–7); M. C. von Heydendorff d. J., Unter fu¨nf Kaisern: Tagebuch, 1786–1856, ed. O. Folberth and U. W. Acker ¨ sterreichs Vergangenheit und (Mun., 1978). Cf., in general, Rotraut Sutter, Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen in O Gegenwart (Innsbruck, 1976).

222


with Saxon concerns, though in different ways. While the Saxons certainly derived some inspiration from their local competitors, they looked mostly to Germany for models of national endeavour. A number of associations were founded, including the inevitable ones for gymnastics (Turnverein) and agrarian improvement (Landwirtschaftsverein). Most important was a new body to promote the study of history, both human and natural: the Verein fu¨r Siebenbu¨rgische Landeskunde.34 Bishop Binder insisted on the use of Hochdeutsch for sermons; observers report people’s tendency to describe themselves indifferently as either ‘Sachsen’ or ‘Deutsche’. The efforts of another pastor, Stephan Ludwig Roth, to recruit peasant settlers from Germany proved vain; but significant individuals moved thence to Transylvania: the innovatory publisher Johann Go¨tt, from Frankfurt am Main; the poet Maximilian Moltke; the writer Anton Kurz.35 The revolutionary year 1848 brought to a head not only the dissensions between Saxons and other Transylvanians, but those within the Saxon body politic. The conservative pro-Habsburg administrative centre of the Ko¨nigsboden, Hermannstadt, clashed with its liberal pro-Hungarian commercial centre, Kronstadt. In between stood spokesmen of the other towns, notably the budding historian and future bishop, Georg Daniel Teutsch, from Scha¨ssburg, and the consciously nationalist, but cosmopolitan Roth, from Mediasch. A majority of the Saxon delegation to the diet accepted Transylvania’s union with Hungary; but an equal majority of those politically active regarded the result as obtained under duress and sought to keep their Austrian dynastic iron in the fire too. Meanwhile the Saxons as a body appealed to the Frankfurt Parliament as members of (in Roth’s guarded words) ‘an honest German people and also honest citizens of that state to which we belong’. But Schlo¨zer’s enthusiasm had been a flash in the pan: now the Saxon press had to report ‘that incomprehensible blunder of cultivated Germans’, in ignoring the clash of nationalities in Transylvania.36 The Frankfurt-backed liberalism of 1848 failed in Hungary, as in Austria, and its Saxon sympathizers were also eclipsed (Kurz actually perished as adjutant to the Hungarian army commander, General Bem). But supporters of the conservative orientation gained little satisfaction: they achieved only an uneasy return to the status quo ante, without the separate Saxon ‘crownland’ or even ‘margravate’ on which they had counted as reward for their devotion. As the 34 Harald Zimmermann in Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. P. Philippi (Cologne/Graz, 1967), 24–53. 35 Jekeli, Bischo ¨fe, 273 ff. (Binder); Auguste de Gerando, La Transylvanie et ses habitants (2 vols., Paris, 1850), ii. 57 f. (terminology). Kaindl, Geschichte der Deutschen, iii. 265–8 (Roth). For the intellectual immigrants, see Zoltań Sa´rko¨zi, Az erde´lyi sza´szok a nemzeti ébrede´s kora´ban, 1790–1848 (Bp., 1963), 117 ff., and Carl Go¨llner, Die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen in den Revolutionsjahren, 1848–9 (Buch., 1967), 26 ff. 36 Sa ´rko¨zi, Erde´lyi sza´szok; Go¨llner, Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, 1848–9, 166–71 (on German unconcern) and passim. Andreas Mo¨ckel in Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Philippi, 1–21, at 12 f., for Roth’s words. Cf. below, p. 235.


223

mortified Teutsch put it: ‘We must hold to the German government of Vienna although—and this is the deeply tragic part—that government wretchedly and suicidally keeps on treading underfoot precisely those interests of ours which cause us to support it.’37 By the end of the 1850s the restored Habsburg absolutism collapsed in its turn, hastened on its way by an outspoken reformist from Kronstadt, Karl Maager, who briefly became the toast of the opposition throughout the Monarchy. With the Compromise legislation of 1867, which restored an autonomous Hungarian state, including Transylvania, all attempts to maintain the Saxons’ historic position under the aegis of a benevolent and kindred Austria had reached the end of the road.38 In the new integral and liberal Hungary, the Saxons finally lost their privileges: the Ko¨nigsboden was swept away, and the Universitas reduced to a shadow. In the event this proved a less serious blow than had been expected. The Saxons largely preserved their economic advantages, helped by a network of local financial and commercial institutions. The Lutheran church, under Teutsch, assumed some of the functions of the Universitas, and its school system flourished (a considerably higher proportion of pupils in the Saxon area entered secondary education than in either Austria or Prussia). Magyarization was largely resisted, and the Rumanians were more or less held at bay. But most of the old public role had been lost, and Saxon politicians—divided as before into a Hermannstadt-based right (now known as Altsachsen) and a Kronstadt-based left (the Jungsachsen)— were left to pick up crumbs from the Hungarian parliamentary table.39 Another consequence of 1867 was to throw in the Saxons with the rest of Hungary’s Germans. Most of these Swabians, though almost ten times as numerous, possessed far less national consciousness: their settlements were dispersed and miscellaneous, the villages often of quite recent origin, and the town dwellers wide open—given the Lutheranism of many of them and the long neglect of their interests by Vienna—to the blandishments of the Hungarian reform programme, with its consequent assimilatory effect. Such conformity with Magyardom came to characterize even the long-established but isolated communities of the Zips, on the border with Poland; and some of the extremer Hungarian chauvinists of the years around 1900—Be´la Gru¨nwald and Jeno˝ Ra´kosi, for example—came from a Swabian or Zipser Saxon background.40 Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the nineteenth century a handful did assume an overtly German-national stance hostile to Magyar hegemonic claims. 37 Irmgard Martius, Großo ¨sterreich und die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, 1848–59 (Mun., 1957), 71 (Teutsch) and passim. 38 For a highly favourable view of Maager, see Walter Rogge, Oesterreich von Vila ´ gos bis zur Gegenwart (3 vols., Leipzig/V., 1872–9), ii. 55 ff. It is no accident that Rogge was a north German Protestant. 39 On all this, see Die Siebenbu ¨ rger Sachsen in den Jahren 1848–1918, ed. C. Go¨llner (Cologne, 1988); the relevant educational statistics are at 301. 40 For these two: Miha ´ly Lacko´, Hala´l Pa´rizsban: Gru¨nwald Be´la to¨rteńe´sz mu˝vei és betegse´gei (Bp., 1986); Jo´zsef Schiller, Ra´kosi Jeno˝: egy magańtitka´r feljegyze´sei (Bp., 1933).

224


The leading representatives of this tendency were Jakob Glatz, his son Eduard, and the latter’s son-in-law Edmund Steinacker (who had been born in Germany). As early as 1816 the aspiring writer T. G. Schroër, travelling from his native Pressburg to Halle, entered what he describes as ‘the land of my fathers, where my language is spoken, and mine alone, where one can praise my Luther openly, and . . . where German fidelity and German faith hold sway’. And by the end of the century, although religion and other factors still estranged Swabians among themselves and from the Transylvanian Saxons, Steinacker began cooperation with a certain number of like-minded spirits among the latter.41 By this time—and the fact is central to my argument here—the basis of identity for Saxons had shifted inexorably and decisively in the direction of Germany, at least as a cultural ideal. There was a marked enthusiasm for Prussia. Both Teutsches, father and son, probably the most influential figures in the intellectual life of their people during the whole period from 1848 to the First World War, studied in Berlin and retained contacts there. Other Saxons sat at the feet of Treitschke and similar luminaries. The Verein fu¨r Siebenbu¨rgische Landeskunde ostentatiously elected a string of honorary members from the new Reich. Germans settled in Transylvania as agrarian experts, musicians, teachers, and so on. So too, of course, did some Austrians, but the phenomenon is nevertheless a conspicuous one.42 On the whole, Saxons still found in the nineteenth-century Prussiandominated German state and nation what they were themselves searching for. They identified a Rechtsstaat, which might defend their own historic rights against encroachment. They encountered a Kulturnation, destined to protect their own eminent cultural values from submergence in semi-barbarity. Above all, they looked to a Volkskirche, a church of and for the people, in which the superior merits of Protestantism appeared to stand confirmed: not for nothing was celebration of the anniversary of the Reformation in 1817 the only notable national event of the stille Jahre on the Ko¨nigsboden. The Saxons set up for themselves a kind of disembodied Schillerian ideal, rather as did many Austrian Jews in the same period, according to Steven Beller’s penetrating analysis.43 Like the Jews, however, they conserved a core loyalty to Habsburg rule in its varying manifestations. As one Saxon writer depicted the balance of allegiances: ‘Germany’s 41 Brief accounts of the Glatzes, Schro ¨ er, etc., in Adalbert Hudak and Ladislaus Guzsak, Karpatendeutsche Lebensbilder (Erlangen, 1971); cf. above, p. 155; and below, pp. 231f. Good analysis of Swabian attitudes in Pukańszky, Ne´met polga´rsa´g. Christian Oeser’s—Tobias Gottfried Schroër’s Lebenserinnerungen, ed. A. and R. Schroër and R. Zilchert (Stuttgart, 1933), quoted at 128. On Steinacker: Harald Steinacker, Austro-Hungarica: Ausgewa¨hlte Aufsa¨tze und Vortra¨ge (Mun., 1963), 312–25; Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, 1848–1918, ed. Go¨llner, 219 ff. 42 Teutsch, Siebenbu ¨ rger Sachsen, 245. For this and the next paragraph, see esp. Harald Zimmermann and H. Beyer in Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Philippi, 24–113. Immigrants are noted in Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, 1848–1918, ed. Go¨llner, passim. 43 Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Camb., 1989); cf. Robert S. Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Ox., 1990), 132 f. and passim. For the 1817 celebrations: A reforma´tzio´ . . . o¨ro¨minnepeńek eloäda´sa, ed. Glatz, 272–8. Cf. above, p. 152.


225

muse reveals to us the world of ideals, to which we aspire from our small corner [aus unserer Enge]; in her powerful grip we can restore our German consciousness. But our innermost joys and sorrows, our Heimat, our destiny, only our native [heimisch] muse can sing.’44 Thus polemics about the real or alleged Magyarization of Saxons and Swabians remained petty squabbles. For all that they were (significantly) waged more in Berlin than in Vienna—so far as they were waged outside Hungary at all, or even at home with much intensity—those most concerned about them were also apt to be those most devoted to the Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which appeared the best guarantee of continuing Teutonic influence in the east of Europe. Building on the successes of the Deutscher Schulverein since 1880 and then some limited impact by the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), elements of vo¨lkisch ideology did begin to penetrate to the next generation of Hungarian-German activists after the turn of the century: the so-called ‘Greens’ among the Saxons, and the handful of Swabian radicals. But the nationalist Ungarla¨ndische Deutsche Volkspartei, founded in 1906 by Steinacker and the Hermannstadt politician, Rudolf Brandsch, won no parliamentary seats.45

During the twentieth century most of the uncertainties about identity—and with them the fertile ground for a diaspora mentality—among German settlers abroad were resolved, often in dramatic, even catastrophic fashion. After many generations during which the old homeland appeared very largely indifferent to the fate of any co-nationals dispersed through the rest of Europe and beyond, it suddenly arose as a deus ex machina whereby their status was more or less forcibly and permanently altered. As Germany herself experienced the violent reinforcement of nationalism under William II and Hitler and its subsequent purgation after 1945, Germans elsewhere were exposed to powerful pressures both centrifugal and centripetal. In the USA, the First World War struck as a hammer-blow at the ethnic consciousness of the millions of German-speakers. Their cultural and associational life was destroyed almost overnight in 1917, as it became identified with treachery. In a lesser and somewhat droller way, the subsequent age of Prohibition had a similar effect, since it penalized the large brewers, many of them German by origin, and outlawed a fundamental and characteristic component of German sociability. From the 1920s the surge of new immigrants was reduced by regulatory legislation to a trickle, and although Nazism forced a significant number of notable German and Austrian intellectuals into exile in America, such Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, 1848–1918, ed. Go¨llner, 283 f. Cf. below, p. 241. Austria did nevertheless generate some noise on this issue, from Christian Socials as well as pan-Germans. 44 45

226


people had little inclination to assert any solidarity with the world they had left behind. The more recent fashion in the United States for cultivation of ethnic roots has made its mark: in 1980 a quarter of all Americans, no less than fortynine million people, claimed some element of German descent; there may be six million native speakers among them; important anniversaries of their original settlement are now celebrated. Yet the German ethnicity there appears to have been terminally diluted, and the position of the language is desperately fragile.46 Germans in Russia endured a worse tragedy. No less loyal to their adopted state than their American counterparts, they too encountered opprobrium and suspicion during the First World War. Worse was to follow, albeit not immediately, since the many prosperous farmers among them were wooed by the Communist authorities during the time of the New Economic Policy, and the Volga Germans even gained their own Autonomous Republic in 1924. But by the 1930s those same farmers were condemned as kulaks, and liquidated or transported to central Asia; while on the outbreak of war in 1941 hundreds of thousands of Volga settlers followed them, unjustly accused of collaboration. Their cultural and institutional life, and with it any sense of a corporate identity, was swept away.47 In East-Central Europe, twentieth-century German nationalism was destructive of the local German presence in even greater degree. The cause of that reckoning has been, beyond the immediate physical impact of warfare, not so much alienation from, as fatal attraction towards, the Reich. Again the experience of the Saxons constitutes the most instructive evidence for our purposes. After the military events of 1914–18 had brought them into intensified contact with German as well as Austrian colleagues-in-arms—the Saxon fieldmarshal, Arthur Arz von Straussenburg, for example, became a hero in both camps—they found themselves in a still more isolated and threatened position. The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy eliminated the long-standing nexus to Austria; while the dissolution of historic Hungary threw them onto the tender mercies of the newly expanded Rumanian state.48 Despite their initial acquiescence in these political changes, and the official promises of fair treatment for minorities, the Saxons and other native Germans soon suffered worse 46 America and the Germans, ed. Trommler and McVeigh, i. 223–69 (Ju ¨ rgen Eichhoff, M. L. Huffines, Joshua A. Fishman), ii. 185–203 (Christine M. Totten), 217–31 (La Vern J. Rippley). For the exodus of the 1930s, see Evelyn Lacina, Emigration, 1933–45: Sozialhistorische Darstellung der deutschsprachigen Emigration und einiger ihrer Asylla¨nder aufgrund ausgewa¨hlter zeitgeno¨ssischer Selbstzeugnisse (Stuttgart, 1982); Horst Mo¨ller, Exodus der Kultur: Schriftsteller, Wissenschaftler und Ku¨nstler in der Emigration nach 1933 (Mun., 1984). 47 B. Pinkus and I. Fleischhauer (ed.), Die Deutschen in der Sowjetunion: Geschichte einer nationalen Minderheit im 20. Jahrhundert (Baden-Baden, 1987); Kappeler et al. (ed.), Die Deutschen im Russischen Reich. 48 For the World War, see Siebenbu ¨ rger Sachsen, 1848–1918, ed. Go¨llner, 243–53. I know of no adequate account of the Saxons’ response to the political revolution of 1918–19; but for an individual’s view, see Otto Dahinten, Geschichte der Stadt Bistritz in Siebenbu¨rgen (Cologne/Vienna, 1988), 181 ff.


227

discrimination, including the loss of church property and removal of the last vestiges of their autonomy. The widespread contempt among them for Rumanian, even more than for Magyar, culture exacerbated the sense of grievance. Their ethnic sensibilities, heightened by the mood of the recent war, now focused more directly and powerfully then before on the Reich. And for the first time those feelings were amply reciprocated. Significantly it was only in the 1920s and especially the 1930s that specific terms for Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutschtum and similar expressions) gained general currency in Germany and beyond. Institutions were established to investigate and promote the interests of the newly identified ‘diaspora’. Behind that development lay the lengthening shadow of Nazism, and cultural concerns soon gave precedence to political demands, the more so as the successor states in the east were sucked into the diplomatic and economic ambience of the Third Reich. A majority of the Transylvanian Saxons readily swallowed the hook, playing along with fascist and authoritarian tendencies in Rumania as a whole and seeking privileged status for their community and its racial claims. When the war came to Rumania, and a close military alliance with Germany, 70,000 Saxons and Swabians served in the SS.49 The fearful nemesis now followed swiftly. With the disintegration of Nazi Europe, many Saxons and Swabians fled to what was left of Germany. Others were dragged into captivity in Russia, as the Soviet Union filled the power vacuum in the East. When the screws tightened on those who remained during the appalling years of Communist dictatorship in Rumania, they sought with increasing desperation to return to what they perceived ever more clearly as their original homeland in Germany, an endeavour largely realized during the years since 1989. Thus the wheel has turned full circle: whether the siren calls were those of the Hitlerite Reich or of a Federal Republic flowing in milk and honey, they render it bitterly apposite for me to conclude with the most vo¨lkisch piece of the ancient self-identity of the Saxons. For the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the fate of those children whom he lured through the mountain into the blue beyond, from their hendre beside the Weser to some remote but permanent hafod on the farther side, has for centuries been associated with the settlement of the Germans in Transylvania.50

49 Wolfgang Miege, Das Dritte Reich und die deutsche Volksgruppe in Ruma ¨ nien, 1933–8 (Frankfurt, 1972); Johann Bo¨hm, Das nazional-sozialistische Deutschland und die deutsche Volksgruppe in Ruma¨nien, 1936–44 (New York, 1985). 50 Browning’s poem of 1842 drew heavily for its information on Nathaniel Wanley’s Wonders of the Little World (1667), though the latter, unlike Browning, does not mention the Transylvanian connection. Wanley’s declared sources are Wier’s De Presdigiis Daemonum, Schott’s Physica Curiosa, and Howell’s Epistolae Ho-Elianae; but Richard Verstegen’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605) is an early authority for the Saxon part of the legend (though Hamelin was of course, as Browning reminds us, in Brunswick, not Saxon, territory). Cf. The Poems of Browning, vol. ii: 1841–6, ed. J. Woolford and D. Karlin (L., 1991), 130–42.

13 Hungary and the German Lands in the Nineteenth Century For many centuries ‘Germany’, in the perception of Hungarians, began at the country’s western border. But beyond Austria and the vexed mutual relations on that front which are examined elsewhere in this collection, lay a larger and more attractive German realm. And there were times when representatives of that Germany showed a lively interest in Hungary, with her autonomist and Protestant traditions, and sought her support. This essay pursues some of the resultant political and cultural linkages, beginning in the last decades of the Old Empire, when the Aufkla¨rung created a new intellectual climate and Josephinism new and controversial notions of statehood. In the early nineteenth century liberal and national ideas tended to bring the two sides together, a process which reached its first peak in the entente cordiale between the Frankfurt assembly and the Hungarian parliamentary government in 1848. It culminated again, more effectively, in the solidarity between Dualist Hungary and the Second Reich, especially as personified in the diplomatic harmony between Andra´ssy and Bismarck. Indeed, the common interests of Magyars and Germans both inside and outside the Habsburg lands were a crucial factor in the overall political settlement of nineteenthcentury Central Europe, even though we must not lose sight of points of tension too, as historic Hungarian unease about potential German hegemony vied with dissatisfaction in nationalist quarters about the treatment of Hungary’s German minority.

A few years ago, when the German President was on an official visit to Budapest, his Hungarian equivalent, A´rpa´d Go¨ncz, quaintly observed: ‘Germany is there like a sunlit stone wall for Hungary to lean up against.’1 Such a posture, even if it cost the country dear in two World Wars, certainly encapsulates an attitude frequently manifested earlier too, as we shall see. However, the modern situation is evidently also very different to that which obtained before 1918, from the Hungarian perspective no less than from the German. Old Hungary was a large and multinational land, with correspondingly complex relations to the outside world in general. At the same time a significant part of its population—fully Unpublished; first drafted in 1997 for a lecture at the German Historical Institute, London. 1 ‘Deutschland ist fu ¨ r Ungarn wie eine sonnenbeschienene Steinmauer, an die man sich anlehnen kann’: reported in Die Zeit, 21 Feb. 1997.

Hungary and the German Lands

229

10 per cent in the nineteenth century—was itself German by mother-tongue and ethnicity: the so-called ‘Saxons’, settled both in Transylvania (the ones just encountered in the previous chapter) and the Zips region of Upper Hungary; and the ‘Swabians’, a generic term for the predominantly rural communities elsewhere. Most important of all, ‘Germans’ beyond Hungary began on the country’s very border, since the inhabitants of the Austrian lands largely counted as such in Hungarian perceptions before, and even to a good extent after, the denouement of 1866.2 And these Germans were associated with, indeed some of them were seen as directly responsible for, Old Hungary’s principal political problem: her relationships towards, and within, the Austrian state. In what follows I shall try to concentrate on Hungarian linkage with what can only be cumbrously described as ‘non-Austrian Germany’. But typically this was either mediated by, or a foil to, issues whose centre of gravity lay within the Monarchy, or within Hungary herself. In the beginning, for our purposes, was Joseph II, source of much of Hungary’s nineteenth-century story, whether through his own policies, or as a reaction against them, or in some combination of the two, as the distorted embodiment of an Aufkla¨rung-inspired movement for social, political, and intellectual change. Joseph’s policies elicited fierce Hungarian opposition, which focused on his ‘Germanizing’ decree of 1784 as the most offensive, and sheerly unworkable, of all his reforms there. The year of his downfall, 1790, witnessed a matching crusade against everything ‘German’: dress and manners, as well as language.3 Simultaneously, however, some of the foremost malcontents were making overtures to Prussia, until their conspiracy was seen off by the Habsburg–Hohenzollern compact at Reichenbach.4 This hinted at a future triangular pattern. Yet the underlying cultural impact of Aufkla¨rung was sustained. It built on and reanimated centuries of Protestant contact, mainly through student peregrination, above all to the Saxon universities and to Halle and Go¨ttingen.5 At the last of these, August Ludwig Schlo¨zer became an esteemed teacher of many Hungarian public figures. Then the Romantic mood after the turn of the century was likewise quickly transmitted to Hungary. The two currents combined to generate an impetus for the Magyar national revival, which was predicated precisely on an uneasy relation to German influences. Best known—and already introduced in these pages—is the case of Istvań Szećhenyi, wrestling with his Austrian persona and an irreducibly ‘German’ element in his whole mentality (including the language for his extraordinary Diaries).6 2

Evans, ‘Austrian Identity’, 27–36. For the circumstances of the decree: above, p. 135; Keresztesi, Krońika, 182 ff.; Marczali, 1790/ 1-diki orsza´ggyu˝le´s, i. 341 ff. 4 Gragger, Ungarische Ko ¨nigskrone; cf. above, p. 174. 5 For this continuing process: La ´szlo´ Szo¨gi (comp.), Magyarorsza´gi dia´kok ne´metorsza´gi 6 Cf. above, pp. 185–7. egyetemeken és fo˝iskola´kon, 1789–1919 (Bp., 2001). 3

230


By the same token, Germany served as the chief forum for intensified attempts to promote Hungary abroad, and these involved many Swabians, among the earliest of them the topographer and journalist Karl Gottlieb Windisch in Pressburg and his son-in-law Ludwig Schedius, who edited the Zeitschrift von und fu¨r Ungarn (1802–4). Subsequent initiatives ranged from the Magazin fu¨r Geschichte, Statistik und Staatsrecht der o¨sterreichischen Monarchie (in fact mainly Hungary), which appeared at Go¨ttingen in 1806–8, to the later Vierteljahrschrift aus und fu¨r Ungarn, which briefly operated from Leipzig in the mid-1840s.7 However, it was a contentious picture: Germans also learned of the beginnings of nationality friction in Hungary, especially the Magyar–Slovak tensions, and controversy about them was waged mostly in a flood of pamphlets on German soil, beyond the Austrian censorship.8 At first, cultural issues were politicized only within a domestic context, part of the restricted arena for earlier nineteenth-century Hungarian intellectual life. There was actually a decline in the number of students travelling abroad— although many of them went to German-language Austrian institutions instead, some 9,000 over the period 1790–1850.9 But by the 1840s the wider implications of the burgeoning ‘age of reform’ became apparent as the later ‘AustroHungarian’ question was adumbrated. Liberal Hungarians began to look to (Protestant) Germany as well as to England and—guardedly—France. Bertalan Szemere, the later premier, conceived an admiration for the Prussian educational system; Ferenc Pulszky, who would be his government’s agent in Vienna during 1848, gained an intimate appreciation of German debates, especially artistic and aesthetic.10 The first wider formulation of Hungarian goals came from Count Miklo´s Wesseleńyi—perhaps precisely because the militancy of this combative aristocrat had caused him to be temporarily banished to the Austro-Silesian spa of Gra¨fenberg (just as Szećhenyi later penned his most furious indictment of Habsburg policies while under house arrest in the suburbs of Vienna). Wesseleńyi’s Stimme u¨ber die ungarische und slawische Nationalita¨t, published in Hungarian and then German, at Leipzig in 1843–4, looked to the reconstruction of a— vaguely—constitutional Austria, and to a more unified Germany under Austrian and Prussian aegis, with Hungary as its ‘faithful confederate’ (hı´v frigyese) and ‘defensive bastion’ (ve´dba´stya´ja) against the Slavs.11 Wesseleńyi’s impact was limited 7 Fritz Valjavec, Karl Gottlieb von Windisch: Das Lebensbild eines su ¨ dostdeutschen Bu¨rgers der Aufkla¨rungszeit (Mun., 1936). On Schedius: Istvań Fried in Zeitschriften und Zeitungen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts in Mittel- und Osteuropa, ed. Fried et al. (Berlin, 1986), 139–58; for the Vierteljahrsschrift: id., in Magyar Ko¨nyvszemle, 110 (1994), 41–54. 8 Ja ń V. Ormis (ed.), O recˇ a na´rod: slovenske´ na´rodne´ obrany z rokov 1832–48 (Brat., 1973), prints and discusses a number of these. 9 L. Szo ¨ gi (comp.), Magyarorsza´gi dia´kok a Habsburg Birodalom egyetemein, vol. i (Bp., 1994). 10 Szemere, Utaza ´ s ku¨lfo¨ldo¨n: va´logata´s nyugateuro´pai u´tinaplo´ja´bo´l, ed. A. Steinert (Bp., 1983), 46 ff.; Pulszky, E´letem és korom (2 vols., Bp., 1884), i. 185 ff. 11 Wessele ńyi, Szo´zat, 156 ff., 277 ff.; cf. above, ch. 11, n. 24. Gra¨fenberg is nowadays La´zneˇ Jesenı´k.


231

(otherwise we should remember his aphorism about ‘inventing the Monarchy’, not Palacky´’s, and in the very different context of the Habsburgs as a German dynasty12); and he went well beyond most other Magyar commentators at this stage. Jo´zsef Eo¨tvo¨s for instance, heavily under German influence like all the members of the group known as the ‘Centralists’, only envisaged ‘good government’ in Austria in his tract entitled Reform.13 But by 1847 Batthyańy and Kossuth did start to urge a practical political programme for constitutionalism, as the guarantee of liberal development in the Monarchy as a whole. They linked this to the presumption of a common purpose with Germany in some wider sense against the (pan-)Slav threat: Kossuth even thought of using a Hungarian railway system to attack the Russians in Rumania.14 How far were such attitudes reciprocated? The Austrian political stereotype of Hungary was very largely hostile: it stigmatized outmoded institutions and a tax-dodging Magyar nobility. Deals might be possible, on this view, with conservative Habsburg loyalists (Gutgesinnte, in the parlance of the time)—but then such people were quasi-Austrian anyway—or with peripheral, still more ‘primitive’ groups, whose counter-cultures, if they deserved the name, could be deployed against the Hungarian establishment. That meant especially the Serbs: the Croats had scarcely yet been discovered in this sense. Prejudices of the kind lasted undiminished into the Vorma¨rz. Thus that typical Josephinist bureaucrat, the great dramatist Franz Grillparzer, when visiting Pressburg in 1843, noted in his diary: ‘I propose today to attend a session of the diet, and that’s the real reason that I’m obliged to stay on in this hole even a minute more than necessary.’15 It seems unclear how widely shared were such attitudes beyond Vienna. Already Schlo¨zer had shown himself a fairly disparaging pundit; and many contributors to the Magazin of 1806–8 and similar publications struck an at least mildly censorious tone. In 1799 the young Zipser, Jakob Glatz, a student at Jena, published—anonymously, in ‘Teutschland’—some aptly styled Freymu¨thige Bemerkungen eines Ungars u¨ber sein Vaterland, with plenty of home-truths, in the guise of positive patriotic criticism, about Magyar intolerance, arrogance, and backwardness. His son Eduard became, as we saw earlier, perhaps the first fully conscious ‘Deutschungar’, whose Deutsche Xenien aus und fu¨r Ungarn, printed in Leipzig in 1842, mix wit and insight with spitefulness and ethnic conceit. Sie soll uns nimmer haben Die stolze Herrenbrut, So lang im Herz der Schwaben 12

Cf. above, pp. 202 f. Eo¨tvo¨s, Reform és hazafisa´g, 343–593. Cf. Istvań Fenyo˝, A centralista´k: egy libera´lis csoport a 14 Kosa ´ry, Kossuth Lajos, 223 ff. reformkori Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1997), esp. 153–60. 15 ‘Ich will heute einer Landtagssitzung beiwohnen, was der eigentliche Grund ist, warum ich in diesem Neste nur eine Minute u¨ber die Notwendigkeit auszuhalten mich veranlaßt finde . . .’: Grillparzer, Sa¨mtliche Werke, ed. P. Frank and K. Po¨rnbacher (Mun., 1960–5), iv. 648. 13

232

Regions and their Interplay Noch wallt ein deutsches Blut, So lang aus deutschen Quellen Der Donaustrom sich na¨hrt, So lang auf seinen Wellen Die deutsche Flagge fa¨hrt.16

Such sentiments lay as far from the world of Grillparzer as they did from an earlier generation of Hungarian territorial patriots; and they appear to have remained isolated. Besides registering some of these Austrian and Swabian resentments, Germany also encountered the beginnings of a very different theme: the Pusztaromantik of an evocative and even idealized Hungary. This fed on the folk-tales purveyed by Count Maila´th and other products designed for a German market, including the scholarly historiography of Johann Christian von Engel which uncovered the riches of the country’s medieval past. In the same vein was some of the verse by two further Swabian authors of the period, each popular in a different fashion, Nikolaus Lenau and Johann Pyrker, who both spent much of their time outside Hungary, the latter as a high church dignitary. Lenau was more of an enfant terrible, and so was the young Franz Liszt, born beside the Austrian border, who likewise raised the contemporary profile of Hungary in a broadly favourable way.17 Numerous German travellers from the 1790s on, and particularly those who started to use the new Danube steamers after 1830, found the country at least exotic, and often surprisingly attractive. As observations by the better-informed travellers revealed, there was already some discernment in these German responses, and they had some impact. Herder’s influential comments on prospective Slav advancement (and Magyar decline) were in a class of their own, though much misconstrued during the slow process of transmission.18 Later the predictions about a Slav future in Rotteck and Welcker’s Staatslexikon helped goad Kossuth into action.19 An awareness of Hungary’s South-Slav populations was promoted by the activities of Dositej Obradovic´ (who had many contacts in Germany); by Vuk Karadzˇic´’s Serb ballads, as endorsed through the likes of Goethe; and by the young Ranke’s 16 Cf. above, p. 155, with paraphrase of these lines. Some similar sentiments in Tobias Gottfried Schroër, Lebenserinnerungen, ed. A. Schroër et al. (Stuttgart, 1933), 128 and passim. 17 Johann [Ja ńos] Majla´th, Magyarische Sagen, Ma¨rchen und Erza¨hlungen (2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1837). Engel, Geschichte des Ungrischen Reichs und seiner Nebenlender (5 vols., Halle, 1797–1804) and regular re-editions under similar titles. Ma´ria Ro´zsa, in Magyar Ko¨nyvszemle, 107 (1991), 62–86; Orsolya Bo¨hm, in Ex Libris ex Manuscriptis: Quellen, Editionen, Untersuchungen zur o¨sterreichischen und ungarischen Geistesgeschichte, ed. I. Ne´meth and A. Vizkelety (Bp./V., 1994); Lenau and Pyrker, cf. below, p. 252. Good discussion of Liszt’s Hungarianness in Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, vol. i: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–47 (L., 1983), 48 f., 68, 79 f., 86 f., 254 f., 319 ff. 18 Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. M. Bollacher (Frankfurt a.M., 1989), 686–9; cf. Sundhaussen, Einfluß der Herderschen Ideen. 19 Dea ´k, Lawful Revolution, 44 ff. For the views of Rotteck and others on Hungarian history, see now Ma´rta Fata in Das Ungarnbild der deutschen Historiographie, ed. Fata (Stuttgart, 2004), 49–83.


233

enthusiasm for Kara George’s revolt.20 Moreover, a sense grew in certain quarters that Hungary might be part of the stage for a more cosmic drama, in which the states of the Confederation would have a direct interest. As one writer put it, in a pamphlet entitled Ungarns politische Zukunft, ‘Hungary is a land covered in blood and corpses, which is set to become either a Russian province or a German colony.’21

The events of March–April 1848 strongly reinforced the main lines of this development. Two new liberal regimes were instituted at Frankfurt and BudaPest, advancing parallel claims at the expense of the authoritarian Viennese establishment and entertaining kindred fears about Slavonic solidarity with the old order or with some reincarnation of it. By an irony which can hardly have escaped them, the main manifestation of Slav unity took place at a congress in Prague, just halfway between the two governmental centres. In this connection the first suggestion of a common German–Hungarian destiny, or Schicksalsgemeinschaft, emanated from the German side: a mission sent to Bohemia by Frankfurt’s Committee of Fifty under Dr Ernst Schilling, a Viennese, rapidly and grotesquely concluded that the Czechs ‘seek to subjugate the Magyars with axe and chained club (such weapons as are there in common use)’.22 However, the main initiative for an alliance came from the Hungarians, whose heady anticipation of a complete restructuring of power relations in Central Europe included provision for future Habsburg rule centred on Buda-Pest.23 The Batthyańy cabinet evinced a common enthusiasm for the Frankfurt experiment.24 While that was evidently conditioned by the lack of prospects for any backing from France or Great Britain, it must also have signified immense psychic release for a group fascinated by German culture and near-native speakers of the language for the most part, but so long repelled by the hegemony and disdain of its official representatives in Vienna. Hence the official mission from Buda-Pest to Frankfurt of La´szlo´ Szalay, another of the bilingual and cosmopolitan Centralists, and (briefly) of Deńes Pa´zmańdy, a more homespun figure. Their status was unclear: but they stood under the aegis of Prince Pa´l Esterha´zy, who was widely regarded, even by the Austrian government, as a Hungarian ‘foreign minister’; and Szalay definitely gained its authorization as a ‘Regierungs-Bevollma¨chtigter’. When the premier Batthyańy was later arraigned for treason, the illegality of this mission formed one of the charges, though only 20 Jovan Deretic ´, Dositej i njegovo doba (Belgrade, 1969); R. Lauer (ed.), Sprache, Literatur, Folklore bei Vuk Stefanovic´ Karadzˇic´ (Wiesbaden, 1988); Leopold Ranke, Die serbische Revolution (Hamburg, 1829; Eng. trans. 1847, 1853). 21 For this work, by Wolfgang Berg, cf. Kosa ´ry, Kossuth Lajos, 223, 386. 22 Andra ´s Gergely, in Sz. 130 (1996), 1033 ff. 23 See, most recently, Domokos Kosa ´ry, Magyarorsza´g és a nemzetko¨zi politika 1848–9-ben (Bp., 24 Urba ń, Batthyańy Lajos, 299 ff. 1999), 18 ff.

234


the warped principles of Austrian military justice in the context of civil war could have made it so.25 The German response proved broadly favourable: there was support from Gagern, Gustav Mevissen, Gottfried Eisenmann, the princes Carl Leiningen and Felix Lichnowsky, and others; from Austrian liberals as well, whether Carl Mo¨ring at Frankfurt or such as Ludwig Lo¨hner back in Vienna (and even one or two members of the new administration there like Wessenberg). Furthermore, not just among liberals did the Magyar cause find favour: we should note the interesting case of the future Prussian conservative spokesman Joseph Maria von Radowitz, son of an immigrant Hungarian noble who had lived in Saxony off the profits of a Danubian wine business until it went bankrupt. The ill-starred Lichnowsky too had Hungarian relations.26 In late May Szalay and Pa´zmańdy were feted on their first entry into the Paulskirche, where they promptly had places of honour accorded to them; on 3 July the chamber passed a solidarity resolution; then in August the Hungarians were actually received by the provisional government, i.e. by the Archduke Johann as Reichsverweser. A proposal, with which Radowitz was associated (although he later sought to cover his traces), called for the full diplomatic accreditation of Szalay and for a German envoy to be sent to Hungary in return.27 The background to all these pourparlers was one of broadly grossdeutsch expectations on both sides. A merely personal union with the Habsburg territories outwith the Confederation followed from the Frankfurt rules for Austrian entry. These also assumed the subordination of Austrian diplomacy and a central German command over Austrian troops, which had immediate implications for the army debate sparked in Hungary by the dynasty’s demand for reinforcements on the Italian front. Kossuth made glowing reference to Germany in his brilliant speech against any such commitment on 11 July—and he was even keen, in his febrile mood of derring-do, to give a Hungarian guarantee for the new Confederation. On 3 August the parliament assembled in Buda-Pest refused to assist Austria in any possible war with Germany; on the 6th the Hungarian cabinet’s further discussion of the military question coincided with German colours’ day, when the schwarz-rot-gold flag was hoisted over troops wherever the writ of Frankfurt ran, including Austria.28 25 On the mission: Istva ń Hajnal, A Batthyańy-kormańy ku¨lpolitika´ja (Bp., 1957), 48 ff. Batthyańy: Ka´rolyi, Batthyańy Lajos . . . fo˝benja´ro´ po¨re, i. 281 ff. 26 Radowitz: Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, s.v.; Sheehan, German History, 673–4, 711–15. Reinhold Wolny, Fu¨rst Felix Lichnowsky, 1814–48: Ein fru¨h vollendetes Ritterleben (St Ottilien, 2003). 27 In general: Hajnal, Batthya ´ ny-kormańy, 48 ff.; Ga´bor Erdo˝dy, A magyar kormańyzat euro´pai la´to´ko¨re 1848-ban (Bp., 1988), also on Hungarian press comment; Karl Nehring, in Su¨dostForschungen, 36 (1977), 35–63; Gergely, in Sz. 130 (1996),1050 ff. 28 Kossuth, ´ Ira´sok és besze´dek, 88–111; Ka´rolyi, Batthyańy Lajos . . . fo˝benja´ro´ po¨re, i. 258 ff., 351 ff. For the ‘great-German’ background: Gu¨nter Wollstein, Das ‘Großdeutschland’ der Paulskirche: nationale Ziele in der bu¨rgerlichen Revolution, 1848–9 (Du¨sseldorf, 1977).


235

That zenith soon passed. The Frankfurt government’s Hungarian de´marche was disowned after protest from the reviving Habsburg camp, and in the absence of more than a handful of deputies who cared strongly about it. Then came the failure of a direct Hungarian appeal to the Austrian Reichstag in mid-September, despite the strong efforts of many Germans there in a heroic day-long debate (described in the next chapter of this book). Anyway the stance of Batthyańy’s regime had never gone uncontested within Hungary. Saxon protests at the Transylvanian union assumed from the first a markedly, even passionately, national character. Students called for the ‘sa¨chsisch’ Universitas to be renamed ‘deutsch’ and wore schwarz-rot-gold. The Saxon authorities took their cause to Germany, seeking to disabuse compatriots there (as we saw in the last essay) of ‘that incomprehensible blunder of cultivated Germans’ in ignoring Hungary’s nationality question. They appealed to Frankfurt as well as Vienna, as members of what their best-known spokesman, Stephan Ludwig Roth, called ‘ein ehrliches deutsches Volk und auch ehrliche Bu¨rger desjenigen Staates, dem wir angeho¨ren’.29 (Quite which ‘Staat’ he was thinking of, in the context of 1848, is unclear.) The Rumanians sent an emissary, Ioan Maiorescu, to seek the support of a united Germany for a union of his compatriots under some sort of Austrian protection.30 By early 1849 the tide had conclusively turned. At that point Szalay’s successor, Count La´szlo´ Teleki, issued in Leipzig a Manifest an die civilisirten Vo¨lker Europas, the translated and expanded version of an originally French text for international consumption. In it he insisted the Hungarian struggle complemented that in Germany, as was shown—he averred—by the endorsement for it from all local Germans, except the Saxons. But both the German and the Hungarian revolutionary regimes already faced extinction. It is worth noting that another of this crop of fresh-baked Magyar liberal diplomats, and another magnate, was Gyula Andra´ssy.

As Austria climbed back into the saddle from 1849, German language and culture reasserted themselves in Hungary, picking up on Joseph II’s lead, but now with a pronounced national flavour, for all the ‘Austrian’ political credentials of the new regime. Thus, for example, with Magyar institutions prostrated, the German theatre in Pest took on a new lease of life: its first production was the rustic idyll of Hermann und Dorothea.31 As a German ethos found open favour in public life, that meant a more conspicuous role for its native carriers at 29

Cf. above, p. 222, where the passage is translated. S¸tefan Delureanu, ‘Romaˆnii ¸si ‘‘Germania’’ adunaˇrii nat¸ionale de la Frankfurt’, Revista Istoricaˇ, ns 4 (1993), 965–97. 31 Cf. Ga ´bor Ma´tray, To¨rede´k jegyzemeńyek Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete´bo"l 1848–9-ben, ed. K. Fu¨lep (Bp., 1989), 231, 240 (theatre); cf. 259, 269 (language) etc.; [Heinrich von Levitschnigg], Die magyarische Revolution im Jahre 1848 und 1849, (3rd edn., Pest, 1852), 193 f. 30

236


home, especially the Saxons. Talk of more colonists became a standard theme of national discourse—even the high-minded and ill-fortuned Roth had embraced the idea.32 Non-Austrian Germans were certainly a significant contingent in directing the new Austrian state—most prominent of all the Mitteleuropaër from Elberfeld, Karl Ludwig von Bruck, who with Schwarzenberg sought the incorporation of Hungary too into an Austrian-dominated Confederation—though the rank and file of the ‘Bach’ administrative immigrants to Hungary came from Cisleithania. The outcome was either a heroic Kulturmission or a doctrinaire flop: German readers could take their choice, with Bernhard Meyer’s official Ru¨ckblick, or the ageing Szećhenyi’s devastating rejoinder to it. The patronizing but selfparodying pamphlet Acht Jahre Amtsleben in Ungarn (published later in Leipzig) demonstrated both sides. So did an anonymous Swabian response to ex-premier Szemere’s Magyarocentric claims about ‘Civilization in Hungary’, which asserted the need for German models, but in a free and self-governing Gesamtmonarchie.33 By the same token, any direct Hungarian dialogue with the rest of Germany had been abruptly cut off. Those most compromised in 1848–9 fled abroad, some initially to Germany, particularly Hamburg; but it was too dangerous to remain there for long: as late as autumn 1860 Teleki was picked up in Saxony and forcibly repatriated. Liberal Germany, however appalled by such things as the judicial murder of Batthyańy,34 largely relapsed into silence on matters Hungarian. Most indigenous commentators at home withdrew into internal exile. Only Zsigmond Kemeńy tried to make a public case for the Magyars’ international role as a mediating influence between German and Slav in an Austrian-dominated Mitteleuropa. So did Eo¨tvo¨s at the end of the decade, allowing that Hungary owed to the German lands ‘its whole civilization’ (seine ganze Gesittung), but arguing that no one’s interests were served by trying to turn her into a ‘deutscher Staat’.35 Paradoxically, however, the experience of the 1850s, so German in its trappings, heightened Hungarians’ awareness of this form of government as something distinctively Austrian—after all, since the abolition of the internal frontier that was now their citizenship—and thus made room for more differentiated responses when the political situation eased. That happened by the early sixties, after Solferino, the dismissal of Bach, the suicide of Bruck, the expansion of the Reichsrat, the October Diploma, the February Patent, and much else besides. Now the Hungarian political nation found itself restored to influence 32 Folberth, Stephan Ludwig Roth, 43 ff. On the 1850s: Martius, Großo ¨sterreich. Cf. Heydendorff, Unter fu¨nf Kaisern, 138 ff. 33 For the Ru ¨ ckblick controversy and the Acht Jahre, see below, pp. 257, 271 and n; 280 and n., 282. Civilization in Hungary: Seven Answers to the Seven Letters Addressed, by M. Barth. de Szemere . . . to Richard Cobden, by an Hungarian (L., 1860). In his Ein Diener seiner Herren: Werdegang des o¨sterreichischen Geheimagenten Gustav Zerffi, 1820–92 (V. 2002), Tibor Frank shows that the author of 34 Ka ´rolyi, Batthyańy Lajos . . . fo˝benja´ro´ po¨re, i. 574 ff. this pamphlet was Zerffi. 35 Keme ńy, Va´ltozatok, 436 ff., 518 ff. Eo¨tvo¨s, Garantien, 176 ff.


237

in an Austria engaged in a vertiginous balancing act which sought to sustain hegemony in Germany as well as hegemony at home. Two kinds of attitude— not necessarily exclusively or consistently held—were struck by spokesmen for the Magyar establishment, each of which involved a conception of Germany too. Both presupposed the maintenance of the Habsburg Monarchy in some form. Only some exiles and a radical fringe within Hungary questioned that; and Kossuth disqualified them by his plans for a confederation with Balkan peoples which, consciously designed as the alternative to any German link (he even envisaged French as official language!), fell flat on all sides.36 Both domestic conceptions also assumed personal union, or something close to it, as the nature of the association between a Hungary reconstituted on 1848 principles and Cisleithania. But they differed in their view of foreign policy, hence of relations with the rest of Germany. What we may call the kleinungarisch position disapproved of any kind of Austrian dominance, and sought to minimize the Monarchy’s role in Germany. This stance preserved the legacy of the old nativist politics, eschewing wider horizons and fearing the consequences for Hungary of any Habsburg resurgence. As its leading spirit, Ferenc Dea´k, observed: ‘Germany’s wars are not our wars.’ By contrast the advocates of ‘Grossungarn’ built on the 1848 claim to a Hungarian-dominated Monarchy, while favouring a grossdeutsch solution in the rest of Central Europe which could sustain the great power of the Habsburgs while distracting Austria from ambitions of ascendancy at home. That was already the argument of Eo¨tvo¨s in a pamphlet of 1860 with the programmatic title Die Sonderstellung Ungarns vom Standpunkt der Einheit Deutschlands; and of Kemeńy and others during the manoeuvrings of the next years. It may also have been the preferred option of the future premier, Ka´lmań Tisza.37 What of Bismarck? Some have seen a natural harmony, both before and after 1866, between his plans for Austria and the kleinungarisch position.38 There appears to be little clear evidence for that. Certainly it is true that his appeal to the malcontents in 1866 (like the response of King Frederick William II to Hungarian dissidents seventy-five years previously) was half-hearted and fairly ineffectual. Klapka’s Prussian-backed legions—less than 2,000 strong—only stood ready to invade just as peace was concluded; they spent a few hours in Upper Hungary to no real effect. Bismarck did not favour extending the war to the Hungarian theatre in any case.39 Whether he saw Dea´kist Hungary as 36 S. [I.] Ga ´l (ed.), Kossuth’s Danubian Confederation (Bp., 1944); Lajos Lukaćs, Magyar politikai emigraćio´, 1849–67 (Bp., 1984), 202 ff. and passim. 37 Dea ´k qu. as below, ch. 15, n. 107. Istvań Dio´szegi, ‘A Dea´k-pa´rt e´s a ne´met egyse´g’, Sz. 104 (1970), 227–49; cf. Jo´zsef Galańtai, ‘Osztra´k-magyar egyezkede´s, 1865–7’, Sz. 101 (1967), 1265–1309. For the ‘nagymagyar’ notion, as applied to 1848, see Hajnal, Batthyańy-kormańy, 113–17. For Tisza, cf. Julius Fro¨bel, Ein Lebenslauf (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1890–1), ii. 156–63. 38 Imre Gonda, Bismarck ´ es az 1867-es osztra´k-magyar kiegyeze´s (Bp., 1960); Endre Kovaćs, Ausztria u´tja az 1867-es kiegyeze´shez (Bp., 1968). 39 Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1898), ii. 35, 103 f., ii. 44 f.

238


an automatic ally, or vice versa, is much more doubtful. The Compromise was, after all, mediated by Bismarck’s rival, Beust. Once again a German outsider displayed more sympathy for the Magyar standpoint than did native Austrians: Metternich rather than Kolowrat, Wessenberg rather than Bach, even Empress Elisabeth rather than Emperor Francis Joseph.

During the years after the conclusion of the Ausgleich in 1867, grossungarisch aspirations were buoyed among Hungarians by continuing Austrian embarrassment. At the same time their sympathies lay largely with the French in 1870: Eo¨tvo¨s (though still pro-German himself) said they felt Sedan like a fresh Mohaćs, a deep national tragedy of their own.40 Even the standpoint of the new premier, that ex-Kossuthist Andra´ssy, was at first ambiguous, as in the famous meeting of the Joint Ministerial Council on 18 July, which reluctantly resolved on neutrality in the Franco-Prussian conflict rather than revanche. Later, however, Andra´ssy proved able to heal the breach almost single-handedly, thanks to his immense popularity.41 Altogether the nexus between Dualist Hungary and the Second Reich (within which the situation of Prussia looked a little like that of Transleithania inside the Habsburg lands) was encapsulated in the Bismarck–Andra´ssy relationship, once the latter became Austro-Hungarian foreign minister in 1871, with all that this signified internationally. Bismarck undoubtedly stressed to Hungarians that they needed Prussian support to sustain their position, while the German press took up the ‘pan-Slav’ bogey which so exercised them in Hungary. Even so, it needed Andra´ssy’s authority to make the Dreikaiserbund acceptable, and for decades the possibility of a full German rapprochement with Russia disquieted Magyar public opinion.42 Andra´ssy’s preferment reflected the novel role of Hungarians at the Ballhausplatz generally. Earlier, Esterha´zys, Apponyis, and other clans had already associated parts of the Magyar aristocratic elite with the Monarchy as an international institution. Now they consolidated that place, most particularly in promoting the Austrian alliance with Germany: Count Alajos Ka´rolyi served as ambassador in Berlin through most of the 1860s and 1870s; he was succeeded by Count Imre Szećheńyi, and then by Baron (later Count) La´szlo´ Szo˝gyeńy, 40 Dio ´ szegi, ‘Dea´k-pa´rt’, 245 ff., and id. in Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, vi, pt.1, 376. 41 Istva ¨ sterreich-Ungarn und der Franzo¨sisch-Preußische Krieg (Bp. 1974), 28 ff.; id., ń Dio´szegi, O Bismarck és Andra´ssy, 65–114; Jańos Decsy, Prime Minister Gyula Andra´ssy’s Influence on Habsburg Foreign Policy during the Franco-German War of 1870–1 (Boulder, Colo., 1979). Cf. Heinrich von ¨ sterreichs Vergangenheit (Salzburg, 1949), 43–105; Heinrich Lutz, O ¨ sterreich-Ungarn Srbik, Aus O und die Gru¨ndung des Deutschen Reiches: Europaïsche Entscheidungen, 1867–71 (Frankfurt a.M., 1979). 42 Kor ˇalka in Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, vi, pt. 2, 50 ff. Dio´szegi ibid. vi, pt.1. Cf. the nuanced analysis in Bascom B. Hayes, Bismarck and Mitteleuropa (Rutherford, NJ/L., 1994), 267 ff.


239

who held the post from 1892 right through to 1914. Others like Count Jańos Forgaćh would also be involved in the immediate pre-war policy-making. In the other direction, contacts were strengthened by William II’s successful official visit in 1893 and by the important role of the new German consulate general in Budapest.43 What of Bismarck’s views about Hungary as a whole? The country was hardly a prominent concern of his: there is much more about ‘Unfallversicherung’ than ‘Ungarn’ in the index to his speeches. But on occasion he showed interest in domestic developments there and considerable information about them. The Magyars, he fancies, should secure themselves by ‘alignment with the German element in Austria and Germany’ (‘Anlehnung an das deutsche Element in ¨ sterreich und in Deutschland’—perhaps that is where Go¨ncz derived his O rhetoric, cited at the start of this chapter). Bismarck has praise for the Magyars too: they alone, alongside the Cisleithanian Germans, possess the administrative abilities, political training, intelligence, and property to rule the Monarchy. He wishes there were more of them, and fewer Slavs (‘to´t emberek’). But they are also vitiated by overconfidence, poor judgement, and chauvinism. Bismarck’s admiration for Andra´ssy and Tisza was admixed with reproaches on much the same lines.44 Hungarian attitudes to Germany likewise remained beholden to stereotypes and to earlier ressentiments, as a literary trope, at least, and sometimes as a fullblown ideology.45 The parliamentary opposition grumbled intermittently. As Lajos Mocsa´ry, its most idealistic representative, put the matter soon after 1867: ‘We don’t need German hegemony . . . We don’t want to conspire with the German element against the Slavs.’46 Yet, on the whole, culture mirrored the political entente, as Andra´ssy’s own initial pragmatism appears to have blossomed into more genuine commitment. Moreover, Hungarians seem increasingly to have looked to Germany over the head of an Austria perceived as effete and provincial, albeit still domineering. In the circle around Miha´ly Babits, for instance, the new cosmopolitan poets of the turn of the century, only Kosztolańyi studied in Vienna, and he was deeply disappointed with it.47 Successful intellectuals, such as the historians Henrik Marczali and Da´vid Angyal (both 43 Jeno˝ Horva ´th, Magyar diplomaćia: a magyar a´llam ku¨lpolitikai o¨sszeko¨ttete´sei a bećsi ve´gze´sekto˝l a ketto˝s monarchia felbomla´saíg (Bp., 1928); E´va Somogyi, in Sz. 138 (2004), 601–71. Korˇalka in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, vi, pt. 2, 120 f. on the consulate; cf. Dio´szegi in Sz. 130 (1996), 1144 ff. 44 Gedanken und Erinnerungen, ii. 234, 255, 263; cf. Neue Bismarck-Gespra ¨ che, ed. H. Krausnick (Hamburg, 1940–1), 54 ff., for a conversation with Szo˝gyeńy, Aug. 1889. Dio´szegi in Sz., 130 (1996), esp. 1153 ff. 45 Sa ńdor Rado´, Das Deutschtum in Ungarn (Berlin, 1903), 66 ff.; cf. Johann Weidlein, Deutsche Schuld in Ungarn? Der madjarische Mythos von der deutschen Gefahr (Schorndorf [Wu¨rttemberg], 46 Quoted in Gonda, Bismarck, 81. 1966). 47 Cf. George Cushing in Intellectuals and the Future in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1890–1914, ed. L. Pe´ter and R. Pynsent (Basingstoke, 1988), 152–72 at 158. Cf. Ludwig [Lajos] Ne´medi, Das Gesamtdeutschtum im ungarischen Blickfeld (Bp., 1938), 116 ff.

240


from Jewish families), were more likely to further a career through residence at Berlin or Munich. The same went for many artists and musicians. If the ‘Austrian-German’ problem was now, for the purposes of the present context, subsumed—or sublated—in this way, Hungary’s domestic nationality issue remained as a challenge and potential irritant. Therein, however, Swabians and Saxons both broadly accepted their allotted social, political, and cultural place. Some Swabians in fact became regular assimilators and expositors of the Magyar position: mid-century exemplars are the politician Johann/Jańos Ludvigh and Karl/Ka´roly Kertbeny (born Benkert), who made the Hungarian literature of the day accessible in translation. It is a moot point whether such people contributed to the climate for a wider Magyar receptivity to German culture, provided it was suitably filtered and incorporated. Later a fiercer kind of proselyte gained ground, exemplified by Be´la Gru¨nwald and Pa´l Hunfalvy (born Hunsdorfer), Jeno˝ Ra´kosi (born Kremser), and Ferenc Herczeg. Besides that there was Sańdor Wekerle, thrice premier (and Hungary’s only non-noble head of government under Dualism), but a man who preserved some of the manner (and even looks) of a prosperous Bauer all his life.48 The Saxons too cooperated with government for the most part; but they always kept their emotional distance and nursed grievances over their loss of privileges. In 1888, on the death of Emperor William I, their senior ecclesiastical body, the Landeskonsistorium, wired to Berlin that it ‘feels itself compelled, from that loyalty through which we have been consciously and indissolubly bound to the fatherland for centuries, to give . . . sincerest expression to our most heartfelt sympathy.’ The sentiment echoes that of Roth in 1848, and this time premier Tisza publicly questioned the nature of Saxon loyalty.49 Their underlying spiritual allegiance was hardly in question. As the poet Michael Albert put it, in words already quoted earlier: ‘Germany’s muse opens up to us the world of ideals towards which we strive from our small corner.’50 By that time the country’s rising national tensions had started to attract outside attention. The Bavarian historian Franz von Lo¨her put out a diatribe against Magyarization as early as 1874. The campaign in Hungary began with the activities of the Deutscher Schulverein, in whose interests Karl Ludolf issued a pamphlet in 1882—again in Leipzig—with the programmatic title Sprachenund Vo¨lkerkampf in Ungarn: Ein Mahnruf an das deutsche Volk. Then came the Gustav Adolf-Verein; and then above all the Pan-German League. The Magyars were derided as an ‘Asiatic horde of Tartar origin, a nomadic shepherd people’[!], even (by Ernst Hasse) as racially unassimilable, like the Jews, and so not even a fit part of that German-dominated Mitteleuropa which was the League’s main 48 Puka ńszky, Ne´met polga´rsa´g, 91 ff. Cf., on Wekerle, Ge´za von Geyr, Sańdor Wekerle, 1848–1921: Die politische Biographie eines ungarischen Staatsmannes der Donaumonarchie (Mun., 1993); above, p. 223, for Gru¨nwald and Ra´kosi. 49 Mo ¨ ckel in Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Philippi, 12 f. 50 Above, pp. 224 f.


241

goal.51 Press clashes by 1901, and agitation among Swabians, led to the formation of a political party, the Ungarla¨ndische Deutsche Volkspartei (UDVP) from 1906. Leading roles in it fell to the Saxon journalist Lutz Korodi, the Banat poet Adam Mu¨ller-Guttenbrunn, and above all Edmund Steinacker, the son-in-law of Eduard Glatz. All had long experience of Germany and Austria (Steinacker was brought up partly in Weimar and Stuttgart); and all derived moral and financial backing from the League. Jewish issues began to cloud the picture too, though more vis-a`-vis Austria, where perceptions were coloured by large-scale migration to Vienna from the land whose capital the Christian Social party there coarsely came to call ‘Judapest’.52 All this remained in its time peripheral and small-scale. The UDVP never won a seat; the Pan-German League never overcame its basic inconsistency of deploying anti-Magyar rant within a basically anti-Slav ideology. The only rivals who might logically be preferred to the Magyars were the Rumanians. Yet quite apart from the devastating assault on their Daco-Romanian claims by the Austro-German scholar Robert Roesler in 1871,53 authorities in the Reich made only desultory efforts to influence the Hungarian establishment in favour of them. Meanwhile Magyarized Jews—such as Marczalis and Angyals, and later the circle of Gyo¨rgy Lukaćs and others—became the most firmly Germanophile grouping among Hungary’s intellectuals. Certainly the main realities of this Magyaro-German relationship were not called in question by the Hungarian political elite. Its last peacetime leader, the younger (Istvań) Tisza, studied at Berlin and Heidelberg, greatly admired Bismarck, and proved a firm and active supporter of the German orientation. The assurance of that mutuality may have steeled him, after initial misgivings, to commit Hungary to Austria’s, and Germany’s, war in 1914. Only thereafter did he become concerned about larger German aims: ‘They reach for the whole arm when one gives them a little finger.’54 Yet Tisza was rather a vehicle for implementing the latest version of one of the constants of Hungarian political culture over the previous century and more. And the Schicksalsgemeinschaft had still by no means run its course.

51 Gu ¨ nter Scho¨dl, Alldeutscher Verband und deutsche Minderheitenpolitik in Ungarn, 1890–1914: Zur Geschichte des deutschen ‘extremen Nationalismus’ (Frankfurt a.M., 1978), 53 ff. and passim. Typical statements of the opposing positions are Franz G. Schultheiss, Das Deutschtum im Donaureiche (Berlin, 1895), 36 ff., 111 ff., and Rado´, Deutschtum (Berlin, 1903). A later contribution to the genre, biased but instructive, is Weidlein, Deutsche Schuld in Ungarn? 52 Ingomar Senz, Die nationale Bewegung der ungarla ¨ ndischen Deutschen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Mun., 1977). 53 Robert Roesler, Roma ¨ nische Studien: Untersuchungen zur a¨lteren Geschichte Roma¨niens (Leipzig, 1871). Cf. A. D. Xenopol, Teoria lui Ro¨sler: studii asupra staruintei romaˆnilor ˆın Dacia Traiana, ed. 54 Vermes, Istva ´ n Tisza, 273–5. C. Schifirnet (orig. publ. 1884; Buch., 1998).


PART IV THE REVOLUTION AND BEYOND


14 Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy 1840–67: A Study of Perceptions The turbulent events of the mid-nineteenth century in Habsburg Central Europe have often been examined, and there are authoritative analyses of the series of constitutional expedients then entered into, from the revolutionary governments of 1848–9, through neo-absolutism, and the October Diploma and February Patent of 1860–1, to the complex negotiations which eventually yielded the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the formal creation of the Dual Monarchy. Endless debate surrounds the question whether this last was really the best and stablest outcome for the region at that time. Curiously, however, little attention has ever been given to the patterns of contact and mutual perception which accompanied those developments. This essay sketches in some evidence and reflects on what kinds of commonalities and antipathies played their part in creating the settlements which were reached between the two halves of the Monarchy, and in frustrating those which were not. Did the Habsburg nexus anyway represent the best—even the only—form of association for the peoples of Central Europe, or could alternative models have been conceived of at that stage?

The subject of Hungary’s position within the lands of the Habsburgs in the midnineteenth century may look a familiar one. It is, after all, a theme which could long ago attract the concentrated attention of two of the most distinguished historians of Central-European politics, Louis Eisenmann and Josef Redlich, besides generating more recently a superb analysis from the viewpoint of state finances.1 The terminal date of this essay announces a direct concern with the Ausgleich or Compromise, greatest landmark in the later evolution of the Monarchy, which brought to an end twenty years of at times violent instability and heated argument about the Habsburg Reichsproblem. Thereafter, by contrast, the crucial issue within that complex of ‘imperial problems’, the relation between the lands of the Hungarian crown and the rest of the territories ruled by the Originally printed in E´tudes danubiennes, 2 (1986), 18–39. 1 Louis Eisenmann, Le Compromis austro-hongrois de 1867 (Paris, 1904), described by A. J. P. Taylor, in his Habsburg Monarchy, 1815–1918 (2nd edn., L., 1948), 270 as ‘a work of superlative genius . . . no greater work of history has been written in this century’ (and cf. Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 839). Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem. Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus.

246

The Revolution and Beyond

dynasty, seemed, for half a century and for most practical purposes, to be resolved. One point is regularly and rightly stressed in all informed writing about the making of Austria-Hungary in 1867: indeed, it serves to distinguish informed commentators from uninformed. The Compromise was a bargain between a single Habsburg realm and its ruler. Though an Austrian legislature acceded to its provisions later, the original agreement took the form of a Hungarian law.2 Though its arrangements were much complicated by the different spheres of sovereignty as exercised by Francis Joseph inside and outside Hungary, the Compromise merely created institutions for the conduct of a limited number of common affairs, basically diplomatic and military, which had in effect been run as a joint concern of the two ‘halves’ of the Monarchy from time immemorial. Notoriously the non-Hungarian lands did not even acquire a name in 1867. The ‘Austria’ of everyday parlance was joined by the more precise but also more mystifying term ‘Cisleithania’, a word apparently invented rather earlier by a Bohemian lawyer, Ignaz Wildner von Maithstein.3 Yet with equal regularity the wider context of these facts has been neglected by historians. For if Austria did not exist in constitutional manuals, it was real enough in practice. If it was not unitary as Hungary seemed to be qua partner to the Ausgleich, its various parts stood in the same juxtaposition to Hungary before as after the new laws. What then do the circumstances of the so-called ‘Austro-Hungarian’ Compromise actually reveal about the nature of the relation between Austria and Hungary? More particularly: what was the character of that relation (or rather of those many kinds of relationship) during the period when the Ausgleich was gradually, albeit stormily, taking shape, between the 1840s and 1860s? Did such linkages have an impact on the eventual outcome? What light do they throw on the workability of other hypothetical solutions so freely canvassed both then and by posterity?4 It will be apparent that I am outlining a whole spectrum of questions, from the purest political calculation to the vaguest emotional association. Reasonably concrete political issues are at stake, matters of common ground in representative 2 Text of the main enactment in 1865/7-dik ´ evi orsza´ggyu˝le´si to¨rveńycikkek (Pest, 1869), 12–26. For the excellent exposition by La´szlo´ Pe´ter of the roots of the Compromise in the bargaining mechanisms of Hungarian constitutional law and dietary practice, see above ch. 10, n. 63. 3 Denis, C ˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ii, pt. 3, 114. This attribution to Wildner, born at Krumlov in 1802, died at Vienna in 1854, who drafted Hungary’s first detailed commercial legislation and was a member of the Austrian Reichstag in 1848, I have not seen confirmed elsewhere. Cf. above, p. 129. For an explanation of Cisleithania, see below, p. 248. 4 The present theme received only the most incidental treatment in the extensive centenary literature on the Compromise. See P. Berger (ed.), Der o¨sterreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich von 1867 (V./Mun., 1967); L. Holotı´k (ed.), Der o¨sterreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich, 1867 (Brat., 1971); Galańtai, ‘Osztra´k-magyar egyezkede´s’; id., Az 1867-i kiegyeze´s (Bp., 1968). Gyo¨rgy Szabad, Hungarian Political Trends between the Revolution and the Compromise (Bp., 1977), likewise rests content to declare (p. 167) that the Compromise was not ‘a compact among nations of . . . the Empire’, without examining whether the preconditions were ever present for it to be so.

Hungary in the Habsburg Monarchy

247

bodies, administration, economic policies. But they shade into imponderable considerations of perception and stereotype. The more imponderable, the greater the historiographical neglect.5 I shall concentrate here for the most part on fairly tangible, politicized ground: therein lies the peculiar significance, in terms of attitudes, of the years I have chosen. The flux of mid-century gave some scope even to extreme positions—the full separation of 1849 alternating with the close union of the 1850s—besides provoking conscious appraisal of all the intermediate points. Yet political attitudes are surely inseparable from larger reflexes, semi-conscious assumptions born of experience and cultural formation; and so, while I do not presume to envisage my reader hastening away to comb (for instance) the memoir literature of the day or the plots of forgotten novels for evidence, I hope he may agree that these matters, too, have their importance and would merit some attention.

First, a brief excursus into prehistory. The year 1526 brought a purely personal union to the three main blocks of Austrian Habsburg territory in Central Europe, on top of their traditional, quite limited neighbourly contacts. But the next decades saw not only the first centralizing attempts of the dynasty; they witnessed also some formalized links, however irregular, between all its subjects, in the form of assemblies of delegates from different diets.6 At first these were encouraged by the crown, seeking to expedite negotiations over revenue. Later, however, the estates took the initiative and met together, either to take advantage of dissensions within the ruling house (1606–9), or to defy their rulers altogether (1618–20). The outcome was disastrous for estates’ claims to a stake in sovereignty (rather than just to a defence of noble privilege). At the same time it delivered a very painful warning to the crown. The Habsburgs proved from then on consistently unwilling to contemplate any repetition of such Generallandtage, even if efficiency—and perhaps morale—counselled it, and central administration might have benefited from it, as Christian Julius Schierl von Schierendorff (an enthusiast for the British parliament) argued in an early eighteenth-century memorandum.7 At all events they registered a negative success: witness the totally 5 Two related subjects: foreign views of Hungary, and Hungarian views of the Germans, have indeed generated some interpretative literature over the years. But the former genre usually examines the attitudes of western and German travellers only; while the latter—a product especially of the 1920s and 1930s—neglects the problem of Austria. Cf. above, ch. 13, and Evans, ‘Austrian Identity’. 6 Cf. Johann Loserth and Franz von Mensi, ‘Die Prager La ¨ G, 103 ¨ndertagung 1541/2’, AO (1913), 433–546; Hermann I. Bidermann, Geschichte der o¨sterreichischen Gesammt-Staats-Idee (2 vols., Innsbruck, 1867–89), i, 3 f. and passim. 7 Alfred Fischel, Christian Julius von Schierendorff, ein Vorla ¨ ufer des liberalen Zentralismus im Zeitalter Josefs I. und Karls VI. (V., 1906); cf. Peter von Chlumecky, Karl von Zierotin und seine Zeit (2 vols., Bru¨nn, 1862–79), i. 857 ff., for some similar thinking a century earlier. The Hungarian estates regularly sought commercial negotiations with their Austrian counterparts, but were always refused: see Horva´th, Ipar és kereskede´s to¨rteńete, 156 f.

248


uncoordinated resistance to Joseph II’s unpopular reforms, even at a level on which, given some elements of social and cultural integration, we might most expect it, with the aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Nevertheless Joseph, in dramatically accelerating the pace of dynastic centralization, also sowed the seeds of modern political opposition in the Monarchy. The milieu of radical pamphleteers and the literary underworld might well yield most traces of an ‘Austro-Hungarian’—as against a merely loyalist—network of contacts during the later eighteenth century.8 War and reaction cut them off. From the 1790s, decades of mutual isolation and poisoned relations set in. The rooted dislike of things Austrian in Napoleonic Hungary was noted by French, even by Russian travellers; whereas Hungary’s reluctance to bear the full weight of the Monarchy’s wars and its debt attracted censure in Austria.9 This was not mitigated—indeed it may have been exacerbated—by Francis II’s assumption of the title ‘emperor of Austria’ in 1804, since Hungary took no official cognizance of the decree, and the Habsburgs left it at that. At the outset of our period then, whatever the constitutional situation (which was muddy enough in all conscience), and notwithstanding their ultimate loyalty to a common ruler, Austrians and Hungarians perceived themselves as living in distinct realms. The border between them, symbolized rather than defined by the little river Leitha near Vienna, was a firm, traditional frontier, questioned only at its extremities in Dalmatia, which formed a peripheral problem for all but the Croats, and in Galicia, to which Hungary staked a fitful and slightly unreal claim. That frontier differentiated fairly clearly the populations on either side, even where limited ethnic overlaps existed.10 ‘Cisleithania’ and ‘Transleithania’ is a cumbrous terminology, dating only from mid-century and confusingly turned on its head in the ‘Lajtańinnen’ and ‘Lajtańtu´l’ of Hungarian parlance; but it already stood for a genuine division. It was not necessarily the case that a Czech or Pole (say) felt closer to Vienna than to some place in Hungary: that is a slightly different question, and in the early nineteenth century he might think them equally foreign. But in the old-established Hungarian state non-Magyars as well as Magyars still recognized a primary loyalty to their own kingdom (if not to 8 Evidence in Silagi, Der geheime Mitarbeiterkreis. The Austrian Jacobin Andreas Riedel drew up plans for a ‘gesammtmonarchischer Volksrat’: see Fritz Valjavec, Die Entstehung der politischen Stro¨mungen in Deutschland, 1770–1815 (Mun., 1951), 454–90, and Alfred Ko¨rner, Andreas Riedel (Cologne, 1969), 54–72. 9 Ka ´roly Kecskeme´ti (ed.), Te´moignages français sur la Hongrie a` l’e´poque de Napoleón (Brussels, 1960), passim; Bronevskii, Puteshestvie, i. 254 ff. For Austrian views: Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 178 ff.; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 1, 82–5. 10 For the impact of Galicia on Hungary at this time, see Endre Kova ćs, A lengyel ke´rde´s a reformkori Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1959). Commentators such as Robert A. Kann (e.g. in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, iii. 1311) seem to exaggerate the significance of ethnic overlap. Austrian citizenship (Staatsbu¨rgerrecht) as codified in the Bu¨rgerliches Gesetzbuch of 1811 did not embrace Hungarians until the introduction of the Reichsbu¨rgerrecht under the constitution of 4 March 1849: cf. Alfons Lhotsky, Aufsa¨tze und Vortra¨ge, i (V., 1970), 365–88, at 382 f.; and above, ch. 7 passim.


249

the Hungarian ‘empire’, as some Magyars were already beginning to call it); they retained an emotional allegiance to their historic but threatened Latin designation as Hungari.11 During the Vorma¨rz contacts grew. As we saw in a previous chapter, a rising number of Hungarians became involved in the arcana of state, and aristocrats especially, often linked to Austria by marriage, made Vienna-based careers in the higher administration, diplomatic service, or army. In so far as they thereby joined a totally kaisertreu caste with aulic rather than territorial loyalties, they are less interesting for our purposes. Thus we have a Zıćhy or Na´dasdy guiding the imperial financial establishment (to little profit); we have several Esterha´zys and Apponyis employed as ambassadors, and continuing to serve through times of constitutional stress. Above all we have Hungarians in the military officer corps: most famous of them Ludwig—or Lajos—Benedek, the commander against Prussia in 1866; most forgotten Adam Rećsey, septuagenarian premier of Hungary at imperial behest for four days in October 1848. Rećsey’s luckless immediate predecessor, General Lamberg, the plenipotentiary murdered by a Buda-Pest mob a week earlier, was likewise Hungarian-born, as was Hentzi, who the next year defended Buda for the Habsburgs to the last man. Yet as midcentury events were to show, few magnates, or even soldiers, became totally deaf to national inflections. Benedek could be offered command of the Hungarian troops (honve´d ) in 1848, and he remained widely popular there in the 1860s; Lamberg was entrusted with his mission precisely because his name had a good ring among compatriots.12 The rest of society likewise began to cross the frontier more. Steamships plied the Danube from 1830; railway construction just anticipated the revolution. It is difficult to estimate the effects of this in an age of rising national consciousness: increased travel could frequently heighten patriotic sentiments, but it also tended to engender a spirit of cooperation, especially in commercial matters. That was certainly the case with a thoughtful stonemason from Szeged called Kova´ts, who moved about widely in Austria and Germany as artisan and student and left a record of his impressions.13 Intellectuals too became more mobile. A mixed bunch of Hungarians settled in Vienna: Jakob Glatz and other Lutheran theologians, Jan Csaplovics the ethnographer, Jo´zsef Ma´rton the grammarian. Prominent among them was the Jewish satirical journalist, Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, while the German-language press in Hungary owed much to Cisleithanians like Heinrich Levitschnigg, Moriz Mahler, and Adolf Neustadt, a Jew from Prague who ran the influential Pressburger Zeitung in the 1840s.14 ¨ sterreich, ed. Drabek et al., 81–98. Cf. above, ch. 8, n. 24. Moritz Csa´ky, in Ungarn und O H. Friedjung (ed.), Benedeks nachgelassene Papiere (3rd edn., Dresden, 1904), 109 ff., 165 ff. Albert Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora Magyarorsza´gon, 1849–65 (4 vols., Bp., 1922–37), iii. 59 ff. For Rećsey, Lamberg, and Hentzi, see the entries in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon. 13 Istva ń Kova´ts, Egy szegeńy po´rfiu o¨neletrajza, ed. S. Ba´lint (Bp., 1981). 14 There is something on all these figures in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon. See also Steinacker, ‘Jakob Glatz’; Vendelin Jankovicˇ, Jań Cˇaplovicˇ: zˇivot, osobnost’, dielo (T. Sv. Martin, 11 12

250


Moreover, these decades saw the beginnings of Slav ‘mutuality’ as proclaimed by the pan-Slav enthusiast Jań Kolla´r, especially the links between Czechs and Slovaks, which were nourished for a time by the potent idea of Czechoslovak linguistic and cultural identity and by a modest level of personal contact (the Bohemian journey of Hurban in 1839, dripping with Romantic pathos, captures the mood exactly). In lesser degree cross-border connections developed also among South Slavs, notably in the circle of Kopitar and Vuk Karadzˇic´.15 From about 1840 open political opposition intensified: at home the estates’ revival led by the Hungarian diet; abroad a stream of critical pamphlets evading the censorship.16 Neither endeavour was, on the face of it, much harmonized. However great Metternich’s private fears of enemy solidarity,17 Lower Austrian leaders long seem to have remained largely ignorant of developments on the other side of the Leitha. The nebulous influence of Hungarian liberal constitutionalism was anyway roughly balanced by the first Austrian interventions over the national struggle there, especially over Magyar treatment of the Slovaks (as in the Thun–Pulszky correspondence, already introduced). Even outspoken German liberals like Franz Schuselka could be very dismissive of Hungarian political pretensions.18 Meanwhile domestic issues absorbed the attention of Magyar leaders. Even their most advanced thinkers such as Eo¨tvo¨s hardly raised larger constitutional questions before 1848—the one Hungarian public figure who had done so at all directly was actually a member of the dynasty, Archduke Joseph—while the Ve´degylet (economic defence league) movement showed how far xenophobia could be carried.19 There is, nonetheless, another side to the story, however dimly illuminated as yet. Metternich, basically unsympathetic despite his Zıćhy wife and his grant of 1945); Moritz Csa´ky, in Wegenetz, ed. Plaschka and Mack, 356–69. The Lutheran theological faculty in Vienna, founded in 1819 to supplant the foreign influences on Protestant students, was at first staffed largely by Hungarians. 15 Miloslaw Josef Hurban, Cesta slowa ´ ka ku bratru˚m slawensky´m na Moraweˇ a w Cechaćh, 1839 (Pest, 1841). The two most important mediators were Sˇafa´rik, who settled in Prague from 1833 (see Karel Paul, Pavel Josef Sˇafarˇ´ık, zˇivot a dı´lo [Pr., 1961]), and Palacky´ (see below). On Kopitar and Vuk, cf. Pogacˇnik, Kopitar. 16 Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, ii; Viktor Bibl, Die niedero¨sterreichischen Sta¨nde im Vorma¨rz (V., 1911); Antonıń Okaćˇ, Cˇesky´ sneˇm a vla´da prˇed brˇeznem 1848 (Pr., 1947). For the pamphlets: Jan Heidler, Cˇechy a Rakousko v politickyćh brozˇuraćh prˇedbrˇeznovyćh (Pr., 1920), with a listing of some 17 Schlitter, ‘Die Wiener Regierung’, 268 and passim. Hungarian ones too. 18 Thun, Stellung der Slowaken; cf. above, p. 202. Cf. also the pamphlets minutely but somewhat tendentiously ed. Ormis, O recˇ a na´rod. Franz Schuselka, Oesterreichische Vor- und Ru¨ckschritte (Hamburg 1847), 235–8, 268–71. Joseph A. von Helfert, Geschichte der o¨sterreichischen Revolution (2 vols., Freiburg/V., 1907–9), i. 26 ff., 479 ff., stands both as a contemporary witness (Helfert was born in 1820), and for the numerous hostile opinions he cites. The 1840s saw a growing and pejorative currency of the word ‘Magyar’ in German-language sources. 19 Jo ´ zsef Eo¨tvo¨s, Reform és hazafisa´g, 516 ff.; confirmed in Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 575; though Varga, Helye´t kereso˝ Magyarorsza´g, 115 ff., argues for rather greater Hungarian concern. On the Palatine Joseph’s earlier suggestions for applying Hungarian models in the rest of the Monarchy, see Moritz Csa´ky, Von der Aufkla¨rung zum Liberalismus (V., 1981), 98 ff. For the Ve´degylet: Horva´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 269 ff. Miklo´s Wesseleńyi’s influential Szo´zat (1st edn., Leipzig, 1843), does consider a federal reorganization of the whole Monarchy, but only en passant. Cf. above, p. 201.


251

indigenatus,20 was not the only Austrian to take the temperature of Hungary. One leading noble reformer, Georg Wilhelm von Walterskirchen, had estates straddling the Leitha and pursued the cause of agricultural improvement in both ¨ sterreich und dessen countries. Baron Andrian, author of the best-selling O Zukunft, noted the merits of Hungarian activity (and tried to liaise with it on the eve of the revolution); so, in his guarded fashion, did the harassed and frustrated senior bureaucrat Pillersdorf.21 Most foreign pamphlets by Habsburg nationals streamed off the same German presses (Hoffmann and Campe in Leipzig and Hamburg), and their campaigns can hardly have been quite divorced from one another. The devious Gross-Hoffinger wrote intelligently about both the Austrian and Hungarian situations, while Ignaz Wildner (whom we encountered above) had professional experience on either side of the Leitha. And did the elusive Scho¨nholz, author of a remarkable, semi-factual evocation of Biedermeier Vienna, really live ‘ten years in Hungary’, as one of his other books proclaims?22 Moreover, Magyars regularly balanced their sense of self-sufficiency by showing a receptiveness to the cosmopolitan attractions of the Habsburg capital, as did the great innovator Szećhenyi, and Eo¨tvo¨s, and Pulszky who met his wife there in 1845 and was swept off his feet by its sophistication.23 Even the Ve´degylet demonstrated the limits of separateness: not only had it grown out of envy at the economic progress being achieved across the Leitha; but it proved a resounding failure, and its prime sponsor, the firebrand Kossuth, soon proposed instead negotiations with Austrian representatives (not just with the crown) about modifying internal tariffs.24 All this yet remained inchoate, mirroring uncertainty about their spiritual allegiance among so many Hungarian intellectuals. The first stage in a heightened patriotic consciousness could still embrace Hungarus-style, even old-Austrian loyalties, either with those whose first 20 Andics, Metternich, argues, with some exaggeration, for Metternich’s total malevolence towards Hungary; contrast the interesting, though not very plausible claim by Gyula Miskolczy, Kamarilla, that his good intentions were frustrated by a ‘camarilla’ of Slavs; cf. above, p. 199. 21 Walterskirchen: Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v.; Bibl, Die niedero ¨sterreichischen Sta¨nde, 191 ff. Victor von Andrian-Werburg, Oesterreich und dessen Zukunft (2 vols., Hamburg, 1843–7), i. 159–61, ii. 188–97; important new material in A´gnes Dea´k, in Kromeˇˇr´ızˇsky´ sneˇm, 1848–9, a tradice parlamentarismu ve strˇednı´ Evropeˇ: Der Reichstag von Kremsier, 1848–9, und die Tradition des Parlamentarismus in Mitteleuropa (Kromeˇˇr´ızˇ, 1998), 105–14, and in Konservative Profile: Ideen und Praxis in der Politik zwischen FM Radetzky, Karl Kraus und Alois Mock, ed. U. E. Zellenberg (Graz, 2003), 43–66. Franz von Pillersdorf, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß (V., 1863), 18 f. 22 Ma ´rta S. Lengyel, Reformersors Metternich Ausztria´ja´ban (Bp., 1969), for Gross-Hoffinger; on Wildner, see above, n. 3. Friedrich Anton von Scho¨nholz, Traditionen zur Charakteristik ¨ sterreichs, ed. G. Gugitz (2 vols., Mun., 1914); Scho¨nholz was apparently the illegitimate son of O the widow of a Hungarian cameral official. 23 For the case of Sze ćhenyi, cf. above, pp. 185–7, and below, p. 257. Ge´za Voinovich, B. Eo¨tvo¨s Jo´zsef (Bp., 1903); Johann Weber, Eo¨tvo¨s und die ungarische Nationalita¨tenfrage (Mun., 1966), 73 ff. Pulszky, E´letem és korom, i. 185 ff. Cf. also Dańiel Ka´szonyi, Magyarhon ne´gy korszaka (1868, Hungarian trans. by D. Kosa´ry, Bp., 1977), 129 ff. 24 Andics, Metternich, 164 ff.; Horva ´th, Huszono¨t év, ii. 364 ff. This idea, which revived an earlier Hungarian aspiration (cf. above, n. 7), had actually been first mooted in 1833: ibid. i. 305; Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, i. 469 f.

252


language in youth was German (thus Szećhenyi, Eo¨tvo¨s, Pulszky, and many more), or in the particular case of the ‘Swabians’ (Transleithanian Germans), whose mediatory role between east and west represents a largely forgotten chapter in the cultural history of the Monarchy. Thus, to name a handful of the famous, some touched on in my preceding chapter: the lyricist Lenau, originally from the Banat, acquired a following especially in Vienna; Pyrker, patron of Magyar culture but himself a German poet, became successively Austrian abbot, Venetian patriarch, and Hungarian archbishop; Hummel moved westwards from his native Pressburg and his service to the Eszterha´zys; Liszt returned eastwards from his European tours to revel in the adulation of his ‘fellowcountrymen’.25

The tendency towards a certain ‘Austro-Hungarian’ solidarity against the detested autocratic regime received dramatic expression with the outbreak of revolution in 1848. On 3 March Kossuth delivered a rousing speech which suddenly raised the whole issue of general constitutionalism. ‘Since Your Majesty’s imperial government is not constitutional, it therefore cannot be in harmony with our own separate government or our constitutional life.’ That is a recipe for disaster, in the present circumstances: ‘Many crucial questions of the day will only be resolved by balancing our common interests with those of the hereditary lands [i.e. Cisleithania], and we are ready to work to achieve that.’26 Did Kossuth really mean two parallel constitutions, or two interlinked ones? At all events his harangue, translated by Pulszky, had immediate, decisive repercussions in Vienna. On 13 March a popular disturbance overturned the Metternichian system; the first speaker in the crowd, Adolf Fischhof, was a Jew ´ buda. One month later a delegation of councillors from the ‘liberated’ from O city and the Lower Austrian estates travelled to Buda-Pest to hand over a historic trophy as a gesture of friendship. They were led by Hofrat Dercseńyi, a nephew of one of Hungary’s leading writers, senior Habsburg treasury official, and author of a patent system of moral-cum-educational improvement much in vogue at the time.27 In the otherwise spiteful radical Viennese press there was a background buzz of friendly noises about Hungary—a good number of its journalists (Buchheim, Freud, Silberstein, Tuvora, Ungar) had actually been 25 On Lenau’s impact, cf. Briefwechsel zwischen Anastasius Gru ¨ n und Ludwig August Frankl, ed. B. von Frankl-Hochwart (Berlin, 1897), passim. Pyrker, Mein Leben, is an important source. For Liszt, see above, ch. 13, n. 17. See also the sketches in Hudak and Guzsak, Karpatendeutsche Lebensbilder. 26 Kossuth, Ira ´ sok és besze´dek, 12–26; Pulszky, E´letem és korom, i. 253, 269 ff.; Horva´th, ¨ sterreichs Vorma¨rz, iii. 65. Huszono¨t év, ii. 577 ff. Schlitter, Aus O 27 Richard Charmatz, Adolf Fischhof, das Lebensbild eines o ¨sterreichischen Politikers (Stuttgart/ Berlin, 1910), 18 ff. For Dercseńyi, see Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v., and Hermann Meynert, Geschichte der Ereignisse in der o¨sterreichischen Monarchie wa¨hrend der Jahre 1848 und 1849 (V. 1853), 444 f. On these events cf. also Ka´szonyi, Magyarhon, 165 ff.


253

born across the Leitha. Meanwhile the Buda-Pest government of national unity rallied Austrophiles in the cabinet under Lajos Batthyańy, a man impeccably loyal both to the Habsburgs and to Cisleithania (did he indeed, as Pulszky suggests, put Kossuth up to his 3 March theme?).28 All this might be no more than a honeymoon. The April laws created a more or less autonomous Hungarian state, one apparently unwilling to shoulder old Austria’s debts or military obligations, which did not endear it to the western half of the Monarchy. Hungarians countered with deep suspicion of an unregenerate ministry in Vienna, neo-Josephinist rather than Liberal, whose members certainly, in retrospect at least, found Magyar politicians at best a confounded nuisance. Pillersdorf portrays himself in his memoirs as ‘beset by fanatical Hungarian agitators’, while Ficquelmont accuses them of menace and hypocrisy and much else besides. By 1 May the Lower Austrian estates entered an official protest against the projected union between Hungary and Magyar-led Transylvania.29 Then came the first hints—the Croat movement, the Slav Congress— of a campaign to engineer a totally different bond between Cis- and Transleithania in the name of Austro-Slavism, though (as before 1848) we should not exaggerate the extent of collusion, except where dynastic promptings provided the cement for it. In fact the crux of the matter during the summer of 1848 lay not in Vienna or in Buda-Pest, but at Frankfurt. After all, the line of the Holy Roman Empire, hence of the German Confederation, formed the most ancient of all boundaries between Hungary and Cisleithania. As we have seen, Hungarians—expecting a radical transformation of German-speaking Europe—sent emissaries to the Frankfurt Parliament.30 That was no novelty: they had a legacy of Protestant traditions, repeated appeals for Prussian protection, and much other German influence direct from the Reich and the Bund. German Liberals—expecting a stable Hungary—looked to a separate realm, but a desirable partner across the Leitha, in loose association with the new united Germany. Yet the victories of Windischgra¨tz and Radetzky and the revolts of the nationalities sharpened perceptions of a common Danubian destiny on both sides. I should like to examine these perceptions of the Austro-Hungarian relationship from the Austrian side in the light of a single momentous episode: the 28 Cf. the reports by one Miklo ´ s To¨lteńyi in Die Constitution: Tagblatt fu¨r constitutionelles Volksleben und Belehrung. For the journalists, see Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v., and R. John Rath, The Viennese Revolution of 1848 (Austin 1957), 389 ff. passim. Pulszky, E´letem és korom, i. 348. Some documentation of the Vienna–Buda-Pest rapprochement appears also from the pamphlets printed by Karl Nehring (ed.), Flugbla¨tter und Flugschriften der ungarischen Revolution von 1848–9 (Mun., 1977). 29 Franz von Pillersdorf, Ru ¨ sterreich in den Jahren ¨ ckblicke auf die politische Bewegung in O 1848 und 1849 (V., 1849), 30 ff.; id, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß, 100 ff., passim. Ludwig von Ficquelmont, Lord Palmerston, l’Angleterre et le continent (2 vols., Paris 1852), i. 20 ff. For the 1 May de´marche, urged by the Transylvanian Saxons in Vienna, see Martius, Großo¨sterreich, 17, and Nehring (ed.), Flugbla¨tter und Flugschriften, 77–91. 30 See above, pp. 233–5; Hajnal, Batthya ´ ny-kormańy, 48 ff.

254


debate of 19 September in the new Cisleithanian Reichstag.31 Finding itself in a desperate plight face to face with a Croat invasion which looked stronger than it was, and fobbed off by the Emperor and his ministers, the Hungarian government sent a deputation to appeal instead to representatives of the Austrian people. The idea was Kossuth’s, but the group contained such diverse politicians as Eo¨tvo¨s, Wesseleńyi, Dea´k, and Szemere. Their terse request for a hearing precipitated, out of the blue, a heated ten-hour debate (including a half-hour recess for disorder). Should the house waive its rules not to admit deputations in this case of ‘brothers from the other half of Austria’, who belonged neither to some merely local body, nor yet to a foreign power? In short, the Hungarians were not ‘Fremdlinge’, as Goldmark (another immigrant from Transleithania, like his friend Fischhof) put it, in support of the plea. Gesamtmonarchisch issues, those affecting the Monarchy as a whole, must be settled by all the peoples concerned (thus Lo¨hner, an eloquent spokesman for the same viewpoint): Jellacˇic´’s army is a dynastic one, and Hungary is not ‘abroad’, not ‘Ausland ’. The objectors, led by the Czechs, sought to refute that claim. Hungary, they said, has deliberately made itself into ‘Ausland ’; the Magyars have broken away and appealed to Germany; war is the retribution for their oppression of other nationalities. But then again, whatever the Magyars’ record, the issue, according to Schuselka (no friend of theirs, as we already know), is one of Volkspolitik and needs to be heard. Is the present deputation truly representative? If it were not, surely other parties than the Magyar-dominated government would send one? But the Croats, it is objected, have done so, without success. Did not, on the other hand, the Hungarians welcome an earlier delegation from Austria (as we have seen)? Would it or would it not infringe the rights of the Austrian government for the Reichstag to receive the deputation? The ministers Pillersdorf, Wessenberg, and especially Bach stressed this threat to the Gesamtmonarchie; yet (retorted Lo¨hner) if the army is joint, we need a joint parliament to oversee it. Have the Hungarians any mandate to negotiate? Do they really want to join the Reichstag—in which case their votes might prove decisive? What can the debate achieve? But, on the other hand, why not hear them? Weltgeist and Zeitgeist were freely invoked on all sides of this argument, and no clear-cut voting lines emerged, Slav or German, pro- or anti-Magyar. One of the most effective speeches came from a German who knew Hungary well, but cast doubt on the good intentions of her government. At length the motion was negatived, 186 to 108, and the Hungarians were left only the chance to write to the president of the chamber if they chose (as in fact they did at Frankfurt). 31 Officielle stenographische Berichte u ¨ ber die Verhandlungen des o¨sterreichischen Reichstages (5 vols., V., 1848–9), ii. 467–525, with the complete record; now also at www.psp.cz/eknih/184urrs/ stenprot/044schuz/s044001.htm. There is discussion in Springer, Geschichte Oesterreichs, ii. 521 ff.; Pulszky, E´letem és korom, i. 369 f.; Paula Geist-Lańyi, Das Nationalita¨tenproblem auf dem Reichstag zu Kremsier, 1848–9 (Mun., 1920), 100–2; Stanley Z. Pech, The Czech Revolution of 1848 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969), 180 ff. Cf. also Nehring (ed.), Flugbla¨tter und Flugschriften, 108–23, and ibid. 22–5 for the Croat petition mentioned here.


255

It had proved a fascinating and complex debate, one of the high-points of the entire Reichstag, and full of ironies. The Slavs, a majority in the assembly, forewent the opportunity to pass judgement on Hungary; thereby they strengthened a ministry which contained no Slav representatives. While making the most emotional speeches, they insisted on holding to the rules of formal procedure. Above all, the proceedings showed the uncertainties and incongruities of the Austro-Hungarian relationship in a situation where the dynasty had almost been bracketed out of consideration: only the Czech tribune Rieger played on appeals to Habsburg loyalty. The events of September 1848, as the colourful but stillborn Transleithanian deputations to sovereign and parliament coincided with the approach of an ‘imperial’ army, revived popular Viennese enthusiasm for the Magyars and led to the October days. Now uproar about sending troops against Hungary provoked insurrection in the capital. In her turn Hungary—or at least the Hungarian left—came out strongly in support of Vienna; Pulszky and others feverishly sought joint action.32 But there was still much dithering over legalities, and what small prospects of success the revolution possessed had been frittered away by the time the Hungarian army arrived. No identity of views existed among radicals anyway: it is interesting that Fenner von Fenneberg, deputy commander of the uprising and its leading militant, while urging cooperation with the reformist Hungarian authorities, was yet fiercely critical of the Magyars’ treatment of their nationalities.33 By that time, of course, Vienna was not Austria. A majority of the Reichstag moved to Kremsier/Kromeˇˇr´ızˇ, and probably a majority public opinion went with it. The deputies at Kremsier mostly held to a ‘19 September’ view of their purely Cisleithanian function (so it does not belong here to discuss their interesting deliberations), though their proposals remained open-ended, conceived in terms of possible future applicability to Transleithania too.34 In the event they were overtaken by Habsburg force majeure. At the beginning of March 1849, ironically just a year since Kossuth’s speech and more or less six months since the great debate, a new constitution was decreed from above (‘oktroyiert’) which exposed the inconsistencies in both. Here was the first ‘joint’ constitution in the history of the Monarchy, destined, as events soon proved, to introduce the first totally unconstitutional period in the history of the Monarchy, since it never came into effect, but was used to abrogate the Reichstag and Hungary’s traditional liberties as well. 32 F. A. Nordstein, Geschichte der Wiener Revolution (Leipzig, 1850), 175 ff., 235 ff., conveys the pro-Hungarian mood. For the direct Magyar involvement: Meynert, Geschichte der Ereignisse, 535 ff.; Pulszky, E´letem és korom, i. 372 ff.; F. Walter (ed.), Magyarische Rebellenbriefe 1848 (Mun., 1964). 33 F. Daniel Fenner von Fenneberg, Geschichte der Wiener Oktobertage (2 vols., Leipzig, 1849), i. 8 ff., 50 ff., 219–21; ii. 28–30, 166–8, 214 f. 34 Geist-La ńyi, Nationalita¨tenproblem, esp. 159 f.; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 1, 270 f.

256


The éminence grise behind that evolution was Alexander Bach, a man thoroughly bureaucratic and thoroughly anti-Hungarian, as unsympathetic to the country and all its inhabitants as Metternich had ever been. We can follow Bach’s devious argumentation from the claim, elaborated in a government memorandum and read out on 19 September, that ‘Austria’ must have a say in any revision of Hungary’s position within the Monarchy, hence the April laws are invalid (a plain attempt to hoist Kossuth with his own petard, though by ‘Austria’ Bach naturally meant only the Emperor’s ministers), to the later claim—at least in private—that the oktroyiert March constitution had been necessary as a temporary device to bind Hungary to the rest of the Monarchy.35 Nothing in the circumstances of Bach’s quite simple Lower-Austrian background seems to suggest either a positive or a negative perception of Hungarians. The new premier Prince Felix Schwarzenberg’s background could hardly have been more different; but he agreed entirely on Hungary, about which he ‘knew nothing beyond one or two pretty women’—though it must be added that a few of his advisers, notably Wessenberg and Krauss, took a different attitude.36 So Hungary proved not to be ‘Ausland ’ after all, and the Austrian assembly not to be sovereign either. Whereas the protests of German Liberals were muffled for a time (where police action did not silence them totally) by vain expectations of some genuine share in a new gesamtmonarchisch set-up, and by dislike of Kossuthist separatism once the Frankfurt Parliament had gone the way of Kremsier, now some Czech popular and radical sympathy emerged (joining that of a larger number of Poles) for Magyar objectives.37 Meanwhile in Hungary in 1849 the ‘Peace party’ brought together a goodly number of those who—for whatever reason—valued the Austrian link, from aristocrats through solid Swabian burghers to artisans like Kova´ts. Their hopes were ruined: first by Kossuth, whose petty-gentry, Protestant anti-Austrianism now gained every opportunity, and could engineer the deposition of the Habsburgs in April; then by the violent imperial retribution, the martyrs of Arad and many more, as a potent symbol for the next decade and beyond.38 35 Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 1, 188 ff.; pt. 2, 48 ff., 129 f. The memorandum is printed in Joseph A. von Helfert, Revision des ungarischen Ausgleichs aus geschichtlich-staatsrechtlichen Gesichtspunkten (V., 1876). 36 Bach: Heinrich Friedjung, Historische Aufsa¨tze (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1919), 24–39. Schwarzenberg: Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, i. 48 (quoted); Stefan Lippert, Felix Fu¨rst zu Schwarzenberg: eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart, 1998), is not helpful on this point. 37 Jakub Maly ´ , Nasˇe znovuzrozenı´: prˇehled na´rodnı´ho zˇivota ˇceske´ho za poslednı´ho pu˚lstoletı´ (4 vols., Pr., 1880–3), iii. 11, 38 ff., 54 f.; Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, i. 129; Pech, Czech Revolution, 251 f. Polish–Hungarian relations in 1848–9, being far more than just Galician– Hungarian relations, do not properly belong here. 38 Contrast the pro- and anti-Austrian sentiments of two of the protagonists, Keme ńy and Teleki: Guszta´v Beksics, Kemeńy Zsigmond, a forradalom és a kiegyeze´s (Bp., 1883), 54–139; Ladislas [La´szlo´] Teleki, Die Ereignisse in Ungarn seit dem Marz 1848 (Leipzig, 1849).


257

I shall not dwell on the 1850s in the present context. Frenzied official activity in the direction of Austro-Hungarian Gleichschaltung included abolition of the traditional tariff barriers, along with most features of Hungarian administrative separateness; but it yielded few real contacts, and those largely negative ones.39 Peoples were not brought together. Even if the very fact of disparagement of them all as peoples (whether in historical or in national terms) itself left some stores of fellow-feeling for the future, yet the authorities, seeking to bind, only loosed time-honoured ties. One telling vignette to illustrate the point is the fate of Istvań Szećhenyi, whose whole career formed a tense dialogue between the cosmopolitan, aulic, mondain Austrian ambience in which he moved as a young man, and his desperate striving to fulfil a patriotic role (answering inner conviction, not social or political ambition). Hence he was always kaisertreu, but bitter and scathing about successive imperial governments. After the terror of the divisive revolution, for which he held his own initiatives in large measure responsible, had driven him into prolonged bouts of insanity, he recovered enough—at his private asylum in Vienna, be it noted—to observe with withering scorn how that same Vienna affected to civilize Hungary in the 1850s. His last work, Blick auf den anonymen Ru¨ckblick, published anonymously in London in 1859, one of the most vituperative, excoriatory political tirades ever penned, is a reckoning with Austria’s cultural claims—specifically those of Bach—which are put down by hauteur and the wit of a European grand seigneur. Yet they are put down with a chilling inner malaise; and lest we should miss the point (though I fancy that historians usually have), Szećhenyi contrives a preface in which the author of the book is represented as a dying Hungarian e´migre´ and its editor as a German who releases the tract to show how unpopular ‘we Germans have made ourselves’ in the world.40 Both personas are surely projections of Szećhenyi himself. Within a year he was dead by his own hand. Szećhenyi proved unwisely outspoken, unduly pessimistic. By the end of the 1850s centralized absolutism had been discredited. But so, in almost equal measure, had outright separatism. With the Kossuthist roundheads unable to 39 One classic document of alienation is Acht Jahre Amtsleben in Ungarn, von einem k. k. Stuhlrichter in Disponibilita¨t [ed. G. Oehme] (Leipzig, 1861): see below, p. 271. An exception to the sombre general picture might be the experiences of Slovene officials in Croatia: Janez Trdina, Bahovi huzarji in Iliri (2nd edn., Ljubljana, 1951); cf. Jaroslav Sˇidak, Studije iz hrvatske povijesti XIX stoljecá (Zagreb, 1973), 311–24. On the other side, the 1850s witnessed perhaps the zenith of Transylvanian Saxon influence in Austria, though even among the Saxons—so much more proAustrian than the Swabians—there was resentment; cf. Martius, Großo¨sterreich, and the sketches in Sutter, Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen. 40 Ein Blick auf den anonymen ‘Ruckblick’ welcher fu ¨ r einen vertrauten Kreis in verha¨ltnisma¨ßig wenigen Exemplaren im Monate Oktober 1857, in Wien, erschien. Von einem Ungarn. The valuable investigation of Szećhenyi’s last years by Domokos Kosa´ry, Szećhenyi Do¨blingben (Bp., 1981), does not pursue this aspect of his predicament; but cf. the reflections of a Swabian contemporary: Ka´roly M. Kertbeny, Erinnerungen an Graf Stephan Szećsenyi (2nd edn., Geneva/Basle, 1860). See also Evans, ‘Szećhenyi and Austria’, 138–40.

258


launch an offensive, Hungary’s cavaliers, the Old Conservatives, could engage a dialogue with kindred spirits of a feudal and federalist disposition in Austria. Their joint programme possessed a traditional and restorative purpose: contrast 1848, when the degree of cooperation had varied positively with the degree of radicalism. The Old Conservatives were hardly less rootedly patriotic than their rivals, but they were certainly more old-Austrian in sympathy. Most knew Austria well, perhaps lived there for extended periods. Szećsen, for example, was Lamberg’s son-in-law; while a nephew of Szećhenyi (who shared some common ground with the Old Conservatives) actually married the daughter of Francis Joseph’s notorious military alter ego, Gru¨nne. A few made Austrian administrative careers, without losing all commitment to the national cause: thus Antal Forgaćh, who refused to serve the Bach regime at home and became governor of Bohemia—he opened the diet there with a Czech speech in 1861—before returning as Hungarian Chancellor.41 The Old Conservatives’ basic idea was a revival of the former Hungarian constitution, but they—like the forty-eighters—saw the need for coordination with their Austrian partners. Since they mistrusted popular assemblies, ministerial procedures, and central controls, they cast around for a possible scheme of common self-government. They conceived a plan, in some ways the logical quid pro quo for abortive 1850s attempts to impose upon Hungary the Cisleithanian pattern of crownlands (Kronla¨nder), whose most important component would be to export the Hungarian counties in the other direction. It is perhaps most explicitly and cogently advanced in a secret memorandum of mid¨ sterreichs auf ungarischer Grundlage mit 1860 to the Emperor, ‘Verfassung O 42 Ru¨cksicht auf den status quo’. Hungary’s political institutions, so this document argues, are the oldest in the Empire (although interestingly they are held to derive ultimately from an ‘uralte deutsche Gauverfassung’); they are justified by legitimacy and sentiment. If generally espoused by the dynasty, they could satisfy the constitutional Zeitgeist, provide a model for Italy and Germany, further the alliance with England, and even resolve the nationality problem by shunting it onto branch lines in the provinces. There follows a scheme for counties (evidently dominated by local notables), to elect to diets, which should elect a Reichstag of mandated representatives, all for gradual introduction throughout the Monarchy. The official inauguration of the designs of the Old Conservatives and their Austrian friends, in a scaled-down form, took place with the October Diploma of 1860. It proved a resounding failure (I do not need to go into the circumstances). The tragedy of the aristocratic ‘Octobrists’ was that some fruitful 41 In general: Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem. i, pt. 1, 460 ff.; De ńes, ‘Hungary’s NineteenthCentury Conservatives’, neglects this aspect. On Forgaćh: Denis, Cˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ii, pt. 3, 27 f., 92, 96; Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, i. 261, 268; iii. 288 ff. and passim; Oszka´r Sashegyi, Ungarns politische Verwaltung in der A¨ra Bach (Graz, 1979), 52, 66, 94; and cf. above, p. 205. 42 Printed in Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 2, 243–58. The ideas are very close to those of Eo¨tvo¨s at the time: Garantien, 192 ff. and passim; cf. also Pillersdorf, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß, 234–57.


259

initiatives for reactivating conciliatory old-Austrian traditions inevitably suffered from association with the defence of privilege and arbitrary rule, and therefore lost their validity for good.43 Moreover, Old-Conservative notions were widely shared in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church in Hungary which, alienated but also compromised by the imperial Concordat of 1855, likewise showed itself a surprisingly narrow bridge to Austria (as, after all, it had done, mutatis mutandis, in the 1780s).44 Most Magyar opinion angrily and emotionally repugned this construction of a conservative Austro-Hungarian identity; across the Leitha, the Diploma and its unruly effects alike provoked renewed aversion among the German middle class to noble-dominated, Magyarizing, tax-dodging Hungary. The failure of the Diploma programme, which had been squared with landowners in Bohemia and Galicia, also proved to have cut the ground from under any possible bargain with the Slavs. There was some scope for that, albeit restricted scope, in terms of mentalities. Not so much on the basis of ‘AustroSlavism’: that was a feeble weapon around 1860. Hungary’s Slavs looked to domestic guarantees rather than to a political de´marche from Cisleithania; and contacts across the border had been reduced, especially since the Slovaks moved towards cultural autonomy vis-a`-vis the Czechs (the young cultural organization Matica Slovenska´ numbered only twelve private subscribers in Bohemia and Moravia).45 More important now was the perception of Hungary as a whole. The Czechs were arguably less anti-Magyar in the early 1860s than at any time before or after, at least since 1620 and leaving aside the limited episode after 1782, when Hungary provided ministers and training for the reconstituted Calvinist Church in Bohemia.46 At the Reichsrat in 1861, when the new semiLiberal imperial government called on deputies to support its hard line against Hungary, the Slavs abstained from voting (their neutrality being technically a re-run of the session of 19 September 1848) and hoped for cooperation with Hungarian representatives there or elsewhere, in order to resist the German centralists. At the Bohemian diet in 1863, Rieger led the call for compromise with Hungary, while the same diet later welcomed Belcredi’s moves to conciliate the Magyars. The Czechs even made cautious personal approaches to Buda-Pest.47 Both before and after 1867 their spokesmen seized on the Hungarian parallel, 43 As was well argued by Aurel von Kecskeme ´thy, Ein Jahr aus der Geschichte Ungarns (V., 1862), 44 ff. and passim. 44 Ga ´bor Adriańyi, Die Stellung der ungarischen Kirche zum o¨sterreichischen Konkordat von 1855 (Rome, 1963); L. Lukaćs (ed.), The Vatican and Hungary, 1846–78 (Bp., 1981), esp. 501 ff. passim. 45 Slovak anti-Austrian sentiments are evident in many of the speeches delivered at Turc ˇiansky Sva¨ty´ Martin in 1861: Slovenske´ na´rodne´ shromazˇdenie v T. Sv. Martine 1861, [ed. F. Hrusˇovsky´] (Martin, 1941), 128 ff. and passim. Letopis Matice Slovenskej, iv–v, pt. 1 (1867), 135–59, gives a complete list of the 1,112 subscribers at that time. 46 On this Calvinist episode, see above, p. 194. 47 Der ungarische Verfassungsstreit urkundlich dargestellt, ed. L. K. Aegidi and A. Klauhold (Hamburg, 1862), 101 ff.; Rogge, Oesterreich, ii. 148, 192; Eisenmann, Compromis austro-hongrois, 334 ff.; Denis, Cˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ii, pt. 3, 41 ff.; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii. 142 ff.

260


matching the Transleithanian bid for home rule with vaguer arguments from Bohemian history. Witness the official statement of policy in 1869 which (rightly) contends that the Compromise has actually left Hungary as much a part of the Monarchy as previously—thus may Bohemia too be loyally resurrected—and disclaims any desire to intervene for national equality across the Leitha.48 Much of this looks superficial, the political axe grinding audibly. Besides, such overtures were not reciprocated by the Magyars. Andra´ssy showed himself quite ready in 1866 (well before his more famous sally in 1871) to put the anti-Czech case in historical terms: it is no good trying to undo the verdict of 1620, because that would only make a repetition of it necessary in the future.49 Yet for at least one protagonist the matter involved deeper issues of perception. Frantisˇek Palacky´, acknowledged custodian of Czech national values, had spent years in Hungary as a youth; indeed most of his education was acquired there, and he made intimate friends among the gentry. The sentiments of a ‘naturalized’ Hungarus did not entirely dissolve when he settled in Prague; rather they were gradually transformed during his long political career, via the Frankfurt Letter (which, probably unconsciously, as I suggested before, portrays Bohemia’s traditional relation to the German Reich in much the same terms as the Hungarian opposition saw their country’s relation with Austria) to progressive embitterment in the 1860s. Palacky´’s speech in the Reichsrat during the 1861 debate depicted Hungary’s leaders as mistaken, yet patriotic, and criticized the imperial government’s ‘rancorous unfriendly spirit towards the Hungarian nation’. In the famous articles of 1865, Idea sta´tu Rakouske´ho, Palacky´’s message to the Magyars was openly minatory: remember Bohemia’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sacrifices for Hungary and your traditions of ethnic tolerance; he fulminated against the ‘renegade Slovak’, Kossuth, and hated the thought of Dualism as he saw it taking shape. Yet he still respected the virtues of the ancient Hungarian constitution, which in his view might yet form the model for a reconstruction of the entire Monarchy.50 The strongest political voices in the 1860s, however, were those of the Hungarian and Austrian Liberals. On the Hungarian side that meant primarily Ferenc Dea´k. Dea´k insisted on the ‘1848’ package, including a firm restatement of the demand for constitutional guarantees in Cisleithania. As his second Address in 1861 pointedly enquired: if Hungary’s constitution was forfeited through rebellion, why had Austria lost hers too, although the latter embodied strongly centralist, not separatist tendencies?51 At the same time Dea´k 48 Politische Stimmen aus Bo ¨hmen: Ein Jahrbuch (Pr., 1869), 5 ff., 79 ff., and passim; cf. Denis, Cˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ii, pt. 3, 111 ff., who criticizes Rieger and others for basing their claims too much on Hungarian precedents. 49 Eduard [Ede] Wertheimer, Graf Julius Andra ´ ssy, sein Leben und seine Zeit (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1910–13), i. 223 ff.; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii, 507. 50 Palacky ´ , Radhost, iii. 10–17, 85–91, 158–230, esp. 174–7, 188, 201 ff. Cf., for the Frankfurt point, above, pp. 202 f. 51 The Address is printed in Verfassungsstreit, ed. Aegidi and Klauhold, 129–67.


261

stressed the need for cooperation but not interference, on the basis of partnership between free and independent lands, without any real institutional union between the two halves, merely conferences von Fall zu Fall. This celebrated notion of ad hoc consultation was intended, rather like Malebranche’s occasionalist version of Cartesian dualism, to satisfy theoretical criteria; in practice Dea´k soon allowed the need for some permanent mechanism. By the time of the Easter Article of 1865 he had become more precise about the proposed relation with Austria: Cisleithania should have only unitary representation vis-a`-vis Hungary; its crownlands must be ‘constitutionally free’. While Hungary will not alter her liberties to suit the ‘new constitution of the Cisleithanian peoples’ [i.e. the February Patent], she will always be ready to amend her laws to assure the security of the Monarchy and promote the ‘free and constitutional evolution of the Austrian crownlands’.52 Austria’s Liberals, for their part, grew increasingly well disposed towards dialogue: not Schmerling’s governmental party as such—Schmerling turned out as rootedly, fatefully anti-Hungarian (and not just anti-Magyar) as Bach—but two unofficial groups. The first consisted of genuine moderate federalists, who reached conclusions, already manifest by 1861 in the writings of Fischhof, Unger, Friedmann, and others, which were not altogether dissimilar to those of the Old Conservatives, though they rested on different premisses. Fischhof and Unger actually called for a ‘Pragmatic Sanction of the peoples of Austria’ (meaning Austria-Hungary)—an expression which could stand as Leitmotif for the present essay.53 It is quite striking that even refutations of the Dea´kist position tended at that stage to be at least well informed and at best distinctly eirenical, besides displaying marked sympathy for the character of Dea´k.54 Other, more vital, backing for Hungarian claims came from dissident politicians, the so-called autonomist faction around the Styrian leader Moritz von Kaiserfeld, which looked to Hungary as a bulwark against bureaucratic government and Slav domination.55 52 Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii. 387 ff. For the related issue of Hungarian attitudes to the larger German question in the 1860s, cf. above, p. 237. 53 Charmatz, Fischhof, 148 ff.; O. Bernhard Friedmann, Zehn Jahre oesterreichische Politik 1859–69, vol. i (V., 1879), esp. 212 ff., 266 ff. The same idea was propounded in the same words the following year by an Old-Conservative politician: [Lajos Kovaćs], A birodalom alkotmańyos rendeze´se magyar felfoga´s szerint (Pest, 1862), 38. In the 1850s, however, Schmerling had actually been accounted pro-Hungarian (Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, iii, 157 f.). 54 e.g. [Ottokar Lorenz], Dea ´ k’s Adress-Entwurf und das Staatsrecht Oesterreichs (V., 1861); Franz Schmitt, Die Rechtsverha¨ltnisse Ungarns zu den u¨brigen La¨ndern der oesterreichischen Monarchie (V., 1861). Cf. Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v. ‘Dea´k’; Pillersdorf, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß, 234–57; Briefwechsel Gru¨n–Frankl, ed. Frankl-Hochwart, 109 ff.; Rogge, Oesterreich, passim; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem. ii. 51 ff., 731 f. (and contrast Redlich’s animosity towards most other Magyars, ibid. 266 ff.). 55 Rogge, Oesterreich, ii. 158 ff., 267 ff., 367 f.; Franz von Krones, Moritz von Kaiserfeld, sein Leben und Wirken . . . in den Jahren 1848 bis 1884 (Leipzig, 1888); Eisenmann, Compromis austrohongrois, 377 ff.; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii. 348 ff.; Somogyi, A birodalmi centralizaćio´to´l, 38 ff., 48 ff., 62 ff., 110 f., 136 ff., 164 ff.

262


Yet there remained a large gap at the personal level. All his solicitude for common constitutional proprieties did not bring Dea´k any closer to the representatives of the Austrian peoples in everyday terms. He wanted to treat only with the Emperor, not with Cisleithanian politicians.56 That was no doubt in large measure because he feared to besmirch the virgin purity of the April laws with any accusations of meddling across the frontier (like Pulszky in 1848); but he was also temperamentally ill-disposed towards Vienna as a city (rumour had it that he went there only under cover of darkness if he could). Although Dea´k’s attitude did not altogether deter his colleagues Trefort, the journalist Miksa Falk, and especially Eo¨tvo¨s, it proved decisive for the circumstances in which the Compromise was eventually concluded.57

Here I begin to close the circle. As we saw at the beginning, the Ausgleich was in the event largely forced upon Austria, irrespective of whether the quasi-federalist Belcredi or the quasi-Liberal Beust stood midwife to it in the imperial counsels. Neither the Dea´kist premiss of the sovereign’s accountability to the rest of the Monarchy—which indeed features several times in the actual Hungarian legislation—nor Francis Joseph’s promise in 1865 of ‘verfassungsma¨ßige Mitwirkung’ (roughly: consent through constitutional channels) seriously applied.58 Thus an uneasy halfway solution was reached, with Cisleithania limping along towards the first inter-delegation bargaining during autumn 1867 and the Dezember-Verfassung at the end of the year. Austrian Germans were persuaded by reasoning of the Kaiserfeld kind and by economic calculations; they managed to insist on broadly Liberal arrangements, hitching them up to the Compromise by arguments from analogy. But no common constitutional bond was forged which could truly work. Perhaps that followed inevitably from a powerful Hungarian desire to have things both ways, since if Cisleithania were to be a genuinely constitutional state, it must possess the right to refuse legislation such as the Ausgleich. If I may return also to a ‘prehistoric’ observation: constitutionally speaking, the situation after 1867 was a little like that which had obtained between the 1620s and the age of Maria Theresa. Hungary sustained her liberties, while Austria and Bohemia operated a genuine but much less effective kind of brake on dynastic government (for all that provincial aristocrats are quite a long way from a semi-democratic parliament). The parallel is not an entirely idle one, since the only times in the whole history of the Monarchy when real forces other than the Rogge, Oesterreich, ii. 312 ff.; Somogyi, A birodalmi centralizaćio´to´l, 95 ff. Jo´zsef Antall, ‘Eo¨tvo¨s Jo´zsef Politikai Hetilap-ja e´s a kiegyeze´s elo˝ke´szı´te´se, 1865–6’, Sz. 99 (1965), 1099–1129; Galańtai, ‘Osztra´k-magyar egyezkede´s’, 1275, 1302 f.; cf. Eo¨tvo¨s’s own reflections in his Naplo´jegyzetek—gondolatok, ed. I. Lukinich (Bp., 1941), passim. 58 1865/7-dik ´ evi to¨rveńycikkek (n. 2 above), introduction and paras. 5, 23, 25, 54, 69; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii. 449–52. 56 57


263

Habsburgs, and from both sides of the Leitha, sought the basis for a common structure of government were the early seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century. The former period had its influence on the latter. Estates’ antecedents were consciously evoked by Schmerling and Szećsen on the Ministerial Council in 1861 (and the February Patent prohibited collusion between local diets),59 while Francis Joseph’s apprehensions of a Generallandtag long led him to anathematize any common parliament—at least one that possessed real teeth—almost as much as did the Magyar centre and left. Arguably the very idea of joint representation became intolerable to the Hungarian opposition only after the Habsburgs had themselves repeatedly rejected it. The Compromise did not create ‘Dualism’. In so far as that meant largely a separate Austria and Hungary, it already existed well-nigh irreducibly as a perception (and if it meant ‘double centralism’, the two-way division of the upper administration, it was not confirmed until 1871, after the collapse of the Bohemian negotiations which we considered in an earlier chapter60). The years from the 1840s to the 1860s might conceivably have yielded a different solution, but the Compromise built on the status quo. It confirmed a duality which could have been developed or mitigated, but hardly abolished entirely; and we may note that in the early 1860s the term ‘dualism’ was freely used to describe the bygone, ancien re´gime situation where a constitutional Hungary had faced an absolutist Austria.61 The Compromise created a superstructure of common affairs, adequate for short-term coexistence under dynastic aegis. Yet the legacy of the evolution which culminated in 1867 hardly provided enough cohesion in other areas for lasting congruity rather than divergence. It was not simply, or even primarily, a matter of high politics; but movements of popular opinion are much harder to pin down. Many Austrians became proMagyar in March 1848, their enthusiasm quickly cooling again, especially after April 1849. Renewed sympathy emerged by 1859, then was largely dissipated during 1860 and 1861.62 For Hungarians the autumn of 1849 proved a watershed, at least until the fall of Bach allowed the people of Austria to appear again separate from the regime. Thus the revolution of 1848–9, in revealing the mass weaknesses of the Monarchy, revealed also its resources of mass strength;63 whereas the experiences of the next decade tended for the first time to alienate other nationalities from the Germans en bloc, a process retarded but not reversed during the freer climate of the 1860s. 59 Ibid. i, pt. 1, 709 n., 711; Reichs-Gesetz-Blatt fu ¨ r das Kaiserthum Oesterreich: Jahrgang 1861, 80, paras. 41, 43, for Lower Austria, and similarly in the other Landesordnungen. Cf. Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, iii. 217 f. 60 Above , pp. 207 f. 61 Eo ¨ tvo¨s, Garantien, 25 ff.; Friedmann, Zehn Jahre, 137, 224 ff.; Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 1, 629 and passim. Cf. also below, ch. 15, n. 80. 62 Rogge, Oesterreich, i. 89 ff., 119 ff., and passim; Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, iii. 184, 195, and passim; Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, ii. 964 ff. passim. 63 This point is rightly stressed by Eisenmann, Compromis austro-hongrois, 140 ff.

264


Both individual political stances and opinion at large on these issues were surely crucial to large questions about the fate of the Monarchy. Despite imperial-and-royal ministries, some economic integration, and so on, mutual ignorance and unconcern grew more widespread after 1867.64 Magyars looked to a ‘modern’ Germany, and took Austria for a province of it, thus finding in Bismarck’s Reich a guilt-free focus for Hungary’s Teutonic traditions and increasingly imagining themselves sovereign at home. Austrians found Magyar Hungary alien, with its new linguistic barriers and the impenetrable walls of its ever more institutionalized culture. The asymmetrical intellectual relation, whereby any educated Hungarian knew German, whereas Magyarica, like Slavonica, non leguntur, now worked itself through; revenge, perhaps, for the asymmetrical political relation we have detected, whereby a pro-Austrian attitude in Hungary meant interference (to secure constitutional government) in Cisleithania, whereas a pro-Hungarian attitude in Austria involved noninterference in Transleithania. The old pan-monarchical viewpoint died away, like the larger sense of the term ‘Austria’, leaving nothing to replace it. So, for all the myriad casual contacts of an increasingly mobile age, did a generation which had sustained some genuine intellectual rapport, but which had little further contribution to make after the 1860s. Who (besides the literary specialist) recalls today that the work of that most ‘Austrian’ of writers, Adalbert Stifter, originally appeared in Pest with the publisher Guszta´v Heckenast, to whom the author was linked by ties of intimate friendship; or that Hungary’s most articulate political theorist, Jo´zsef Eo¨tvo¨s, thought and wrote mainly in German, published mainly abroad, and saw his daughter married to a leading Austrian Liberal?65 The older mentality is especially clear, perhaps, with the great liberal historians of mid-century Austria. Consider the sedate, urbane Arneth, his mother a friend of Eo¨tvo¨s’s aunt, who took holidays—like Beethoven before him—with the Counts Brunswick at Martonva´sa´r, and adopted a Maria-Theresan view of the burning political questions; the matchless analyst Springer, son of a brewer in a Bohemian monastery, yet expansive and utterly sure-footed on the affairs of Transleithania; the waspish and jaundiced Rogge, unrivalled in his eye for telling detail, who had lived at Pest and harboured no illusions about the real issues there; the meticulous, schoolmasterly Krones, professor at a Hungarian law 64 This large subject requires separate treatment, but there is some interesting confirmation of the argument from P. Hana´k in Wegenetz, ed. Plaschka and Mack, 343–55. Cf. Peter Haslinger, ¨ sterreich und Ungarn, 1895–1994 Hundert Jahre Nachbarschaft: Die Beziehungen zwischen O (Frankfurt a.M., 1996). 65 A large number of Stifter’s most important letters were written to Heckenast; see his Briefe, ed. F. Seebass (Tu¨bingen, 1936). On Heckenast and other ‘old-Austrian’ publishers in Hungary, cf. Pukańszky, Ne´met polga´rsag, 136 ff. For Eo¨tvo¨s: Kristo´f Nyı´ri, A Monarchia szellemi élete´ro˝l: filozo´fiato¨rteńeti tanulmańyok (Bp., 1980), 43 ff.; Plener (son-in-law), Erinnerungen (3 vols., Stuttgart/Leipzig, 1911–21), i. 344, ii. 238, 310, 313, 325, 327. Eo¨tvo¨s’s literary work in Hungarian is a different matter.


265

academy before he settled in Graz; the incomparable polyhistor Wurzbach, whose enormous bio-bibliographical compilation found room for everyone, from the bluest-blooded progeny of A´rpa´d to the lowliest Magyar or Slavonic scribbler.66 The tradition was sustained longest by their younger contemporary, Heinrich Friedjung, a radical opponent of the Compromise (better, he thought, to set Hungary adrift altogether), but a large-minded chronicler, versed in the Hungarian sources. Friedjung, after all, was a Jew; and the Jews, along with the Swabians, now did most to maintain cohesion between the two halves of the Empire: 25 per cent of the Jewish population of late nineteenth-century Vienna had been born in Hungary.67 Surely, then, the Ausgleich sealed a gradual alienation of Austria and Hungary, however much Francis Joseph might now seek with regular sojourns in Hungary to make his rule a genuinely ‘common affair’.The Compromise cut off some profitable mutual perceptions, surfacing at least in the late 1840s and early 1860s; and it frustrated the sense of many moderates then that the lack of contact between provinces must be made good, in order to secure simultaneously both the Monarchy as a whole and their particular rights within it. For all its vicissitudes, the mid-century had proved more fruitful in indicating areas of solidarity, engendering, among certain groups but not enough of them, some kind of common purpose. In the end the Compromise—which the Emperor resisted for almost twenty years, and which represented the greatest domestic concession of his career—proved to be the last, most unconscious, and most fateful example of Habsburg divide and rule, not so much among those who suffered from it as among those whom it favoured.

66 The worlds of Arneth and Springer may be approached through their identically entitled autobiographies: Alfred von Arneth, Aus meinem Leben (2 vols., V., 1891–2); Anton Springer, Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1892). Cf. the appreciations in Friedjung, Historische Aufsa¨tze, 198–223; and Jan Heidler, Antonıń Springer a ˇceska´ politika v letech 1848–50 (Pr., 1914). I know of no writing ¨ sterreichisches biographisches Lexikon, about Walter Rogge, but Franz von Krones has entries in O 1815–1950 and in Neue deutsche Biographie. For Constant von Wurzbach see, besides the entry in his own Lexikon, Anton Bettelheim in Neue o¨sterreichische Biographie, i (1923), 214–26; Elisabeth Lebensaft and Hubert Reitterer, Wurzbach-Aspekte (V., 1991), also at www.oeaw.ac.at/oebl/ service/wurzbach.pdf; and cf. Springer, Aus meinem Leben, 265 ff. 67 For Friedjung’s attitude to the Compromise see his Der Ausgleich mit Ungarn (3rd edn., Leipzig, 1878) and Historische Aufsa¨tze, 135–69. On Hungarian Jews in Vienna: John W. Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna (Chicago/L., 1981), 451; Robert Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (Oxford, 1990), passim; McCagg, Habsburg Jews, 146 f.; and such reminiscences as Sigmund Mayer, Ein ju¨discher Kaufmann, Lebenserinnerungen (2nd edn., V./Berlin, 1926).

15 From Confederation to Compromise: The Austrian Experiment, 1849–67 The aftermath of the revolutionary events of 1848–9, the most extreme breakdown of political authority in Central Europe before the twentieth century, was an imperial regime which succeeded in concentrating unprecedented power in Habsburg hands. Often dismissed as a desperate expedient or a mere repetition of the failed Metternichian style of government, this was in fact a serious and—in its own terms— coherent venture, akin to others elsewhere in the Europe of the 1850s, which recorded major material achievements. Whereas Austria’s international overstretch, compounded by the Crimean war, is well enough known, the most substantial essay in the volume examines the domestic political and cultural presuppositions of this absolutism, arguing that it suffered not only from alienating too many ancestral supporters of the dynasty, but also from mixing ideologies. Its maintenance of established Austrian priorities, above all in the role assigned to the Catholic church, sat uneasily with new goals of a German national kind. That becomes more intelligible if we understand that the ‘experiment’ was both heavily influenced from other parts of Germany and also designed to consolidate Habsburg supremacy there. In the 1860s the ‘great-Austrian’ vision rapidly faded. Military defeat went pari passu with a series of compromises at home, which benefited both national and regional interests, notably those of the Magyars in Hungary. Altogether the course of events suggests many correspondences with earlier occurrences and circumstances treated in this book. The authoritarian regime was in some respects akin to eighteenthcentury Josephinism—for some explicitly so. It succumbed to a new liberal critique— but one which articulated long-standing forces of opposition. Whereas Bohemia could still, within limits, be integrated, the Hungarian problem reasserted itself in many familiar ways (cf. several earlier essays). And ultimately the imperial ideal, with its German centre of gravity, still underpinned the dynastic ambitions of the Habsburgs, as it had done for centuries, prolonging the traditional forms of weak hegemony which distinguished Central Europe (cf. below) throughout the period under consideration here.

Sixty years ago Lewis Namier, in a lecture of lasting influence on what he called the ‘Revolution of the Intellectuals’, famously exposed the incompetence, selfishness, Originally delivered as the Raleigh Lecture on History 1994, and printed in Proceedings of the British Academy, 87 (1995), 135–67.

From Confederation to Compromise

267

and short-sightedness of the leaders of Germany in 1848: all those ‘professorial lambs, bitten by the pan-German dog’.1 But was not what replaced them when the revolution failed even more incompetent, selfish, and short-sighted? The restored regimes, especially the reinstated head and doyen of the Confederation, Habsburg Austria, have had a bad press (to which Namier himself, born a subject of that dynasty, contributed on other occasions2). Plenty of commentators, contemporary and later, have seen the 1850s as the beginning of the end for the Habsburgs. I cite the editor, in 1852, of the English translation of a work on the circumstances which had led to revolution in the Monarchy four years earlier: Austria has not made the slightest progress towards consolidation of her factitious greatness. She subsists only by virtue of a permanent state of siege and martial law. . . . Her subject populations . . . are more disaffected than ever. No inward vitality binds together the heterogeneous elements of her Empire; the prestige of her might is gone, the sanctuary of her authority has been profaned, her weakness made manifest, the mechanism of her power laid bare. She maintains her state by terrorism alone.3

The immobile system of the Metternichian Vorma¨rz—so runs this verdict—had been brought down by elemental passions of discontent. Various kinds of liberal and national programme were advanced, and much reform implemented in the year of revolution. The greatest failings of new regimes in the area were their lack of experience, and fratricidal conflicts among opponents of the old order. It was no tribute to the Habsburgs or their vacillating rump government, but the army held firm against assorted Czechs, Italians, and German radicals, till they were able to initiate a general restoration, though they had to call on Russian help to defeat rebellion in Hungary. A new emperor, the malleable young Francis Joseph, was dominated by a clique of aristocratic-military-clerical reactionaries under the cynical and debauched Prince Felix Schwarzenberg. Forced to grant a constitution (dated 4 March 1849), they never intended to observe it; and duly retreated into absolutism again with the Silvester Patents at the end of 1851. There followed—I am still rendering the most familiar, commonplace account—years with no real policy except repression under Interior Minister Alexander Bach, who succeeded as acting head of government on the death of Schwarzenberg in 1852. Austria lived on borrowed time, friendless in Europe, especially after alienating Russia by her indecisive stance during the Crimean War, till she blundered in 1859 into a disastrous passage at arms with northItalian patriots and their French allies, which introduced almost a decade of extreme constitutional instability at home. She was quite unable to curb the ideas 1 L. B. Namier, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (L., 1946), quoted at 57. On the circumstances of this work, originally a wartime Raleigh lecture at the British Academy, see Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography (L., 1971), 253 ff. 2 See now Amy Ng, Nationalism and Political Liberty: Redlich, Namier, and the Crisis of Empire (Ox., 2004), 72–4, 164 ff., and passim. 3 William Coxe, History of the House of Austria . . . to Which is Added, Genesis, or Details of the Late Austrian Revolution by an Officer of State (4 vols., 2nd edn., L., 1872), iv, p. cxxvii.

268


and ideals, especially the national claims, which had surfaced in 1848, or to sustain rivalry with Prussia for leadership of the fast-advancing Germany, since the regime remained essentially inert, inefficient, backward, and stagnant.

There are grains of truth in all that; but mainly it is the stuff of legends, tenacious despite a few of the weightiest and profoundest tomes in Habsburg historiography which bear on the issues.4 In fact there is quite another way of looking at these developments. In important respects, ‘neo-absolutist’ government was not restorative at all, but innovative, on a broad front, with a clear and ambitious programme, which drew on significant bases of support. Let us hear now from the actual author of that work translated in 1852, Count Hartig: Those who are presently occupied with the task of re-erecting the Austrian state edifice are not to be reproached for the troublesome dust occasioned by the removal of the rubbish, and for the comfortless damp and chilliness pervading the new-built halls, which have not been allowed time to dry. Such are the inevitable consequences of rebuilding.5

Or, to stay with English connections, we might ponder the opinion of Francis Newman, erratic and free-thinking brother of John Henry, that Austria had undergone a ‘radical revolution’ by 1860 ‘which wants to cut away the present from the past’.6 Schwarzenberg headed a team of hard-nosed centralists, many of them younger men, who commanded a much more powerful and extensive state machine than before. For the first time a uniform administrative organization legislated for the whole Monarchy, epitomized by the new official record of their acts, the Reichsgesetzblatt and provincial Landesregierungsbla¨tter. Their work embraced, on the one hand, all territories, in a scheme—outlined in the Silvester Patents—of crownlands, circles, districts and communes, which largely disregarded traditional entities, and permitted only the most minor of local variations. Hungary was fully incorporated, and interior tariff barriers were entirely abolished.7 On the other hand, it embraced, in principle, every level of society, 4 Eisenmann, Compromis austro-hongrois. Heinrich Friedjung, Oesterreich von 1848 bis 1860 (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1908), incomplete; and cf. below, n. 98. Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem. Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus. Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 426-94. For Hungary: Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, a work unjustly neglected, even in its own country. 5 Coxe, History, iv, p. cxxxv. Hartig was a minister before 1848; his shrewd dissection of Vorma¨rz Austria and its nemesis first appeared as Genesis der Revolution in Oesterreich im Jahre 1848 (Leipzig, 1850). Architectural metaphor came naturally enough to Bach himself: ‘Today we have as yet no state . . . so we must create it, in order to be able to rule like others in Europe. . . . We must build anew . . .’: cited in Otto Urban, Cˇeska´ spolecˇnost, 1848–1918 (Pr., 1982), 110 f. 6 Reminiscences of Two Exiles and Two Wars (L., 1888), 104 and passim. Newman, a serious observer of the Central European scene, was closely associated with Polish and Hungarian emigre´s. 7 Text of the Silvester decrees in Reichsgesetzblatt 1852, II Stu ¨ ck, Nr. 2 (10 Jan. 1852), and in Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 29–34; glossed ibid. 35 ff. Internal customs had already been eliminated in October 1850: Landesgesetz- und Regierungsblatt fu¨r das Kronland Ungarn, 1850, XV Stu¨ck, Nr. 160 (9 July 1850).


269

with full equality before the law and abolition of all peasant subjection. Both these measures had been provided for, of course, in the revolutionary agendas of 1848; but their implementation proved a massive operation, which proceeded according to recognizably modern standards, even if it involved anomalies like reintroducing the birch into Austria from Hungary on grounds of consistency.8 This multifarious activity harnessed considerable resources, in agriculture and industry, with the beginnings of modern economic management and a banking system. Communications dramatically improved, and the urban environment was transformed, especially with the Ringstrasse project in the capital, Vienna. Foreign trade more than doubled. Growth rates roughly matched those elsewhere in the German Confederation.9 The state tapped into these assets with rational reforms of taxation, both direct and indirect, which raised its revenue by two-thirds (in Hungary by four times).10 At the same time it stimulated further advance, the Credit-Anstalt bank being floated as a personal initiative of the Emperor, his minister of finance, and a few courtiers. By 1858, such efforts found their blithe, complacent, punctilious, and indefatigable chronicler in Carl Czoernig, former head of the statistical office. From him we learn of the stunning achievements of the regime: 47,221,812 cubic ft of roadstone used in Hungary; 3,000 km of railways built (including the genuinely pioneering Semmeringbahn); 2,389 post offices established, in various categories; 359 new barges on the Danube plus 100 steamers of the DonauDampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft; the state forestry service wholly and precisely restructured, with its Landesforstdirektionen, divided into Forst-InspektionsBezirke, Forst-Wirtschafts-Bezirke, Forst-Aufsichts-Bezirke, and so forth. Czoernig records a mass of endeavours great and small, from the maintenance of law and order (the police made over one million arrests in 1854, against only 70,000 four years before—what progress!), to measures against cruelty to animals or elaborate safeguards against the explosion of steam-engines.11 His title is ‘Oesterreichs Neugestaltung’. The phrase implies reconstruction, even a kind of renaissance. 8 Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 105 ff. (legal system), 486 ff. (detailed on the Grundentlastung). Eisenmann, Compromis austro-hongrois, 166 n. (whipping). 9 Thomas F. Huertas, Economic Growth and Economic Policy in a Multinational Setting: The Habsburg Monarchy, 1841–65 (New York, 1977); David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1984), 74 ff. These authors minimize the role of 1848–9, and of the abolition of internal tariffs, in economic growth; but that does not affect the present argument, besides which the psychological expectations generated by those events certainly did play a part. Helmut Bo¨hme, Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht: Studien zum Verha¨ltnis von Wirtschaft und Staat wa¨hrend der Reichsgru¨ndungszeit, 1848–81 (Cologne/Berlin, 1966), takes a different view, though—despite his name—he is not well informed on the Austrian side. Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 281 ff., 378 ff., occupies the middle ground. 10 Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 119 ff.; Adolf Beer, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert (Pr., 1877), 202 ff.; Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 439–589. 11 Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 317–20 (roadstone), 365–447 (railways, with massive detail), 462 ff. (mails), 349 ff. (ships), 568-84 (forests), 80 ff., esp. 100 n. (public safety and police),

270


This Austria was a new state. Though the ambitions of Joseph II had anticipated it, the traditions of the old Reich and much else long continued to stand in its way. In 1804 Joseph’s nephew Francis had proclaimed himself ‘emperor of Austria’—but that title only applied ‘without prejudice to the [existing] rights of our various dominions’. Now, for the first and only time during all the centuries of Habsburg rule in Central Europe, a single uniform citizenship, or Reichsbu¨rgerrecht, was instituted, and no intermediate or constraining authorities remained. As the Silvester Patents put it, ‘the lands which under their old, historic or new titles are united with the Austrian imperial state (Kaiserstaat), form the inseparable elements of the Austrian imperial hereditary monarchy (Erbmonarchie)’.12 Dynasticism thus gained confirmation as the first postulate of authority. Whereas his uncle had as recently as 22 October acknowledged himself to be a constitutional monarch,13 Francis Joseph was on 2 December 1848 crowned ‘by the grace of God, Emperor of Austria’. More important: he was perhaps the last major European ruler really to believe it. Skirting the unfortunate irony that he then had to take a leaf out of the rival Napoleonic book with his copycat coup in the dying hours of 1851—Bonapartist emulation which was not lost on a scornful Bismarck14—the handsome, energetic, and brash young ruler set out to make a distinctively Austrian contribution to the practice of nineteenth-century monarchy. As one of his ambassadors put it in 1858: ‘Every power has a moral basis from which it cannot depart unpunished. . . . Austria has for principle the respect due to the imprescriptible rights of sovereigns.’15 Those rights were buttressed by the two supports which had become increasingly indispensable for the house of Habsburg over the previous century: army and bureaucracy. It is a moot point whether the army of Radetzky and Windischgra¨tz saved the Monarchy in 1848–9; if so, then no thanks to its formal command structure. It is more important that Francis Joseph firmly believed so, cleaving to the virtues of a military hierarchy answerable directly and only to himself, and even removed in stages from any ministerial responsibility. The gigantic Arsenal, built in 1848–56 to intimidate the Viennese, is its great monument. Equally and passim. Already in 1845 Szećhenyi had dismissed Czoernig as a ‘terrible chatterbox’ (furchtbarer Schwa¨tzer): Naploí, vi. 252, cf. 333, 582. 12 For 1804, cf. above, p. 198; and for the Reichsbu ¨ rgerrecht, above, ch. 14, n. 10; Erich Zo¨llner in Historica: Studien zum geschichtlichen Denken und Forschen F. Engel-Janosi . . . dargeboten, ed. H. Hantsch et al. (V., 1965), 63–89, on terminology more generally. 13 In the patent reopening the Austrian Parliament at Kremsier/Krome ˇˇr´ızˇ: Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 400. 14 ‘Als Preuße kann ich mich nicht freuen u ¨ ber den 2. Dezember [in Paris], weil ich nur einen Feind, der krank war, momentan erstarken sehe, mit der beilaüfigen Consequenz, daß ein leichtsinniger und lu¨genhafter Freund, Oestreich, einen Zuwachs an Unverscha¨mtheit aus dieser Thatsache zieht’: cited in Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck: Urpreuße und Reichsgru¨nder (Berlin, 1985), 378. 15 Joseph Alexander von Hu ¨ bner to Napoleon III, quoted in Namier, Revolution, 26. Francis Joseph the autocrat is shrewdly, but unkindly dissected by Josef Redlich, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria (L., 1929), esp. 220–53.


271

symptomatic was the Emperor’s practice of transacting civilian business in a general’s uniform, and the promotion of his one-day-old son to headship of a regiment. Over 400,000 men under arms and a new gendarmerie represented a crippling financial burden to which we shall return.16 Centralized administration was likewise a legacy from the mid-eighteenth century, now reinforced with mountains of further regulations, whose summits peep out in the Reichsgesetzblatt decrees. The pages of Czoernig form a splendid testimonial to frenzied activity: a sea of bureaucrats, chopping and changing and surging as they are channelled into this or that laboriously charted and minutely regulated haven of Tu¨chtigkeit and Ordnung.17 There were devoted servants in Vienna, like Joseph Oettl, long-time ministerial secretary and peasant emancipator, a ‘bureaucrat in the noble sense of the word’ (as his biographer Wurzbach, soon to reappear in this narrative, put it), who on the day of his last operation still turned up at his office to make sure the desk was clear.18 Others functioned in the provinces, like Archduke Albrecht—Francis Joseph’s first cousin once removed—who, sent to hold the fort in the new civil-military administrative region of Ofen, had to call in a Saxon eye specialist because of the strain of reading so much paper;19 and down in the localities—witness the richly entertaining memoirs of an anonymous, untranslatable ‘k.k. Stuhlrichter in Disponibilita¨t’, who had to procure table, chairs (!) and much else at his own expense before he could introduce civilization as the regime knew it to remoter reaches of the Great Hungarian Plain.20 By contrast, an earlier prop had to be largely dispensed with: the nobility. The blow to its socio-economic influence was serious enough, even if cushioned by some concessions to landowners in the reform legislation and by windfall agrarian profits.21 But the nobles’ traditional political authority came under siege. Partly they were just not up to the job in hand. ‘I don’t know a dozen men in our class with enough political vision or enough knowledge . . . ’—thus far 16 Schmidt-Brentano, Die Armee in O ¨ sterreich; Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 603 ff. Jean-Paul Bled, Franz Joseph (Eng. trans., Ox., 1992), 101, notes the gazetting of the infant Archduke Rudolf. 17 Observe, in this connection, the thirty-three pages (695–728) devoted to developments in the few months since the book went to press. 18 Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v. Cf., in general, Waltraud Heindl’s Introduction to her edn. of Die Protokolle des o¨sterreichischen Ministerrates, 1848–67. Abt. III, Bd. 2: Das Ministerium Buol-Schauenstein, Ma¨rz-Oktober 1853 (V., 1979). 19 Carl von Duncker, Feldmarschall Erzherzog Albrecht (V./Pr., 1897), 191. Cf. now Matthias ¨ sterreich (Husum, 1997), 138–72. Stickler, Erzherzog Matthias von O 20 Acht Jahre Amtsleben. The anonymous author, having been sent to serve in a legal capacity, found himself promptly redeployed as a district (Bezirk) administrator, with the traditional designation of Stuhlrichter (szolgabı´ro´). So primitive, he tells us, were his conditions of work that it took a year to establish any kind of Ordnung at all, and five years to get a proper office building. When political conditions then changed, in 1860, he was placed in suspension (‘in Disponibilita¨t’) without even a word of thanks. 21 Concessions as in the main Silvester Patent, paras. 9, 16, 34. Cf. Gyula Berna ´t, Az abszolutizmus f o¨ldtehermentesı´te´se Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1935), 53 f., 56 f., 228; and, in general, Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 466; Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 314 f., 540 ff.

272


Schwarzenberg’s cynical mot is well known; but note what follows: ‘ . . . to whom one could entrust a substantial share in power without fear that they would rapidly lose it.’22 Here is the deeper reason for mistrust, since the nobility stood for the constitutional compromises of the old regime. And see where those had led! The new masters ignored bitter resentment at this political effacement. Its best-known spokesman was Windischgra¨tz—who accused the government of promoting communism.23 But let me cite instead a Moravian, Count Egbert Belcredi, to give the flavour: Just as the doctrinaires sought to realize their ideals in 1848 through the violence of the excited mob, with the assumption of power as their legal title, so are things today, only the boot is on the other foot. . . . What conservative institutions the revolution from below left intact, the revolution from above has continued to destroy.24

Symbolic was the comparative exclusion of Prince Metternich, finally back from exile in 1851; whereas his long-time associate, Ku¨beck, an authoritarian fonctionnaire of commoner stock, returned to the innermost court circle.25 Individual aristocrats, of course, remained prominent, like Felix Schwarzenberg himself; but the war of attrition with the rest—among them his literary cousin, ‘Landsknecht’ Friedrich26—profoundly shifted the balance of power within the Monarchy. It is plausible to argue (however unpalatable to liberal and national modes of historiography) that this was the largest single reason for the failure of the new order.

The role of military and civilian cadres is important, but unsurprising. They provided a more powerful material base for Austrian ambitions at mid-century 22 This remark is variously cited. I have translated it from Urban, C ˇeska´ spolecˇnost, 89. Other versions can be found in Adolph Schwarzenberg, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, 1848–52 (New York, 1946), 40; in Alan Sked, The Survival of the Habsburg Empire (L., 1979), 208, who makes rather too much of the regime’s anti-aristocratic credentials; and in Stefan Lippert, Felix Fu¨rst zu Schwarzenberg: eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart, 1998), 206. 23 ‘The most pronounced Communist has not yet dared to demand what Your Majesty’s Government now enacts’: Namier, Revolution, 22. Gerlach in Prussia (which yet still had its diet and provincial Sta¨nde) made the same point: Sheehan, German History, 726. 24 J. Boc ˇek (ed.), Z denı´ku˚ moravske´ho politika v éˇre bachoveˇ: Egbert Belcredi, 1850–9 (Brno, 1976), 34, 36 (Mar. 1852). Cf. ibid., 28: ‘Everything . . . is handed over without protection to the bureaucrats, to organized democracy, or rather anarchy, to the most dangerous proletariat, a uniformed one, to what nowadays is called the regime’ (23 June 1851). 25 See the grumbles passim in Metternich–Hartig, ed. Hartig. Cf. the comment of another of Metternich’s former prote´ge´s, Hu¨bner, in 1859, on the activities of his colleagues at home while he has been ambassador in Paris: ‘Les ve´ritables destructeurs de l’ancienne Autriche n’e´taient pas les re´volutionairres de 1848, c’e´taient eux’: Joseph A. von Hu¨bner, La Monarchia Austriaca dopo Villafranca, ed. M. C. Drudi (Rome, 1959), 64. If Ronald E. Coons, in Gesellschaft, Politik und Verwaltung in der Habsburgermonarchie, 1830–1918, ed. F. Glatz and R. Melville (Stuttgart, 1987), 55–86, is right, Ku¨beck’s despotic tendencies dated back to before the revolution, and linked in closely with his lifelong commitment to Josephinism. 26 On whom see Deutsch-o ¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. J. W. Nagl et al., vol. iii: 1848–90 (V., 1930), 4–6 and 203–8.


273

than is often realized, even if the effect was spoiled by the falling real salaries of officials—and a plethora of petty enactments on the size of their beards etc.— and by wastage in the uncontrolled army estimates.27 But the new political entity needed an equivalent emotional, spiritual, and intellectual allegiance. The task of providing it fell to the other historic ally of Habsburg authority, the Catholic church. We must look back for a moment to grasp the complexities of that assignment. The earlier drive for consolidation of the state had included an ecclesiastical dimension: Josephinist pressure for reform of the church, under the aegis of enlightened officialdom, towards a more subordinate social and pastoral role.28 This proved a controversial and incomplete policy. By 1848 Erastian and progressive impulses had largely run their course. Meanwhile a sort of ‘Oxford Movement’ sprang up to fill the spiritual vacuum: Romantic-conservativeultramontane groupings, inspired especially by the charismatic Clemens Maria Hofbauer, whose order of Redemptorists had over a thousand priests by this time, including a hundred missionaries in the New World, and spawned a spirited and spiritual, at times even spirituel, literary revival among clergy and Catholic laity.29 The revolution, though it carried with it a fringe of religious enthusiasts, was denounced by most clerical opinion. The Austrian bishops, led by Francis Joseph’s old tutor, Rauscher—and with another Schwarzenberg, Felix’s younger brother, Cardinal Friedrich, prominent—became the first organized body to rally to the regime in 1849, and soon received their reward.30 The Emperor, no ostentatious or fervent Catholic, was nevertheless a firm believer, wholly persuaded of his own divine calling, and of the need for a domestic holy alliance. His lieutenant Bach cemented his own fragile position with an increasingly clerical stance. The church recovered much traditional autonomy, together with controls over marriage and, above all, education. These were codified in the Concordat, signed on Francis Joseph’s birthday in 1855 (but proclaimed— quaintly—on the Fifth of November), another stupendous piece of minute social regulation, which included such provisions as that couples married as 27 Officials: Heindl in Protokolle, ed. Heindl; Brandt, Der o ¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 590 ff., esp. 601; Megner, Beamte, 89 ff. (salaries). The overall cost of administration nevertheless doubled in the 1850s, mainly because of the expense of Neugestaltung in Hungary. Sideboards became compulsory after 1848, but beards—as revolutionary symbols—were prohibited: ibid. 335; cf. Gerson Wolf, Grillparzer als Archivdirektor (V., 1874), esp. 56. Army: Schmidt-Brentano, Armee, 104 ff., who cites the mot attributed to Bruck at the time of the Crimean War: ‘Gott erhalte die o¨sterreichische Armee; ich, der Finanzminister kann’s nicht mehr’; cf. Brandt, Der o¨sterreichische 28 Cf. above, pp. 44 ff., 65 ff., 134 ff. Neoabsolutismus, 683–7. 29 The standard treatment of Hofbauer and his friends remains Till, Hofbauer; cf. the background sections to Adam Bunnell’s lively Before Infallibility: Liberal Catholicism in Biedermeier Vienna (L./Toronto, 1990). On the overseas mission: J. Wuest, Annales Congregationis SS Redemptoris Provinciae Americanae (5 vols., Ilchester, Md., 1888–1924); Michael J. Curley, The Provincial Story: A History of the Baltimore Province of the CSSR (New York, 1963). For Catholic literature: Deutsch-o¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Nagl, 243–72. 30 Gottfried Mayer, O ¨ sterreich als ‘katholische Großmacht’: Ein Traum zwischen Revolution und liberaler A¨ra (V., 1989), 141 ff.

274


Protestants, then converted to Catholicism, then reverting to Protestantism again, should stay subject to Roman prescription.31 For our purposes, however, the new ecclesiastical order’s leading sector was a genuine pedagogical renewal under Leo Thun. A major overhaul of elementary schooling went with the introduction of a proper gymnasium system, closely supervised by the clergy: in the late 1850s, 181 gymnasium directors were priests, only 85 laymen. At the top came universities acquiring a research component, and endowed with a kind of patriotic objective.32 The spiritus rector of all this, Count Thun, promoted a vision of greatness rooted in the constructive understanding of the pan-monarchical heritage. His young prote´ge´, Alexander Helfert, compiled a programmatic statement ‘on National History and the Current State of its Cultivation in Austria’. A direct result was the ¨ sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, directed foundation of the Institut fu¨r O initially by a Tyrolean monk whom his abbot granted secondment only with reluctance, but soon revealed as one of the earliest and finest institutions of professional training in historiography anywhere in Europe.33 (It is ironic that future members of the guild would deal so severely with the regime which brought the Institut into being.) Reverence for the Catholic and grosso¨sterreichisch figure of Maria Theresa, who enacted her first great administrative reform exactly 100 years before the neo-absolutist ones, was characteristic of this phase, as in the writings of the Jewish convert Karl Ferdinand Hock and the rising Alfred von Arneth.34 Meanwhile, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, founded on the eve of revolution, was fostered as the hub of scholarly activity in the Monarchy at large; its President, Baumgartner—though a physicist—actually became minister of commerce. A petty official, Constant von Wurzbach, compiled the first dictionary of Austrian national literature, meaning all writers in the Habsburg 31 Reichsgesetzblatt 1855, XLII Stu ¨ ck, Nr. 195 (5 Nov. 1855); ibid. 1856, XLVI Stu¨ck, Nr. 185 (8 Oct. 1856), the supplementary legislation on marriage, over fifty pages of text, with 77 articles followed by 251 clauses (the provision mentioned is at p. 617). The main Concordat is also printed in Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 632–41. 32 Richard Meister, Entwicklung und Reformen des o ¨sterreichischen Studienwesens (2 vols., V., 1963), is a general and positive account; whereas Hans Lentze, Die Universita¨tsreform des Ministers Graf Leo Thun-Hohenstein (V., 1962), makes more play with Thun’s Catholic priorities. A splendid insight into the minutely regulated world of Austrian secondary education in the 1850s is provided by T. A. Matauschek, OSB (comp.), Normalien-Nachschlagebuch fu¨r Lehrer und Direktoren der oesterreichischen o¨ffentlichen Gymnasien (Pr., 1857). Statistics for headmasters are in Rogge, Oesterreich, i. 439 ff. 33 U ¨ sterreich (Pr., 1853). ¨ ber Nationalgeschichte und den gegenwa¨rtigen Stand ihrer Pflege in O ¨ sterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 1854–1954 Alfons Lhotsky, Geschichte des Instituts fu¨r O (V., 1954), is very thorough. Cf., on Helfert, Friedjung, Historische Aufsa¨tze, 224–38. 34 On Baron (from 1859) Hock (1808–69), co-author, with the like-minded Hermann Ignaz Bidermann, of a fundamental study of the Staatsrat, cf. Korˇalka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich, 32, and below, n. 43. On Arneth, whose ten-volume life and times of the Empress is perhaps the greatest monument to nineteenth-century Austrian historiography, see his memoirs, Aus meinem Leben, vol. ii; cf. Friedjung, Historische Aufsa¨tze, 198–209.


275

lands; then commenced his prodigious Biographical Lexicon of the whole Monarchy and its cultures.35 A larger purpose revealed itself here, in the eyes of its propagators: ‘Austria’s Mission as a Catholic World-Power’, first enunciated in the title of a pamphlet by an egregious turncoat called Chownitz, but a sentiment which could rally enthusiasts both at home—especially in the Tyrol—and beyond the borders.36 Catholic immigration had begun in the Vorma¨rz, with the ultramontane publicists Karl Ernst Jarcke and George Phillips, who were then joined by, inter alia, Bernhard Meyer, formerly secretary to the Swiss Sonderbund, and a man given to shallow organicist thinking about the state.37 Friedrich Hurter, likewise from Switzerland, became Habsburg court historiographer. Konstantin Ho¨fler moved to Prague to hammer the Hussites; and two brothers of famous leaders of the German opposition settled in Vienna: Max von Gagern, director of the government press bureau, and Gustav Heine, editor of the semi-official Fremdenblatt, who was later raised to the peerage (what would Heinrich have said?).38 Among those further afield who saw scope in this programme was Sir John (later Lord) Acton, who had taken German lessons in Munich from Meyer, and commented favourably on the Monarchy as a focus for international Catholic loyalty.39

Here we stand at the heart of the ‘Austrian’ endeavour. However, the official Catholic programme was vitiated in three ways. First, there was the incongruity of trading away powers to a reactionary papacy and abandoning some lively liberal theological traditions. In 1857, after a genteel but fierce witch-hunt inside the establishment, the writings of the greatest Austrian religious thinker of the 35 Richard Meister, Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, 1847–1947 (V., 1947). ¨ bersicht der Literatur des o¨sterreichischen Kaiserstaates (V., 1856); id., Constant [von] Wurzbach, U Biographisches Lexikon. Cf. above, p. 265 and n. 36 Julian Chownitz, Oesterreichs Mission als katholische Weltmacht (Schaffhausen, 1850); cf. Ma´rta S. Lengyel, Egy te´velygo˝ Habsburg-alattvalo´ a 19. sza´zad derekań (Bp., 1985). Mayer, ¨ sterreich als ‘katholische Großmacht’, is suggestive, though—being mostly about the Tyrol—a good O deal narrower than its title suggests. 37 For Meyer’s views, see his Ru ¨ ckblick auf die ju¨ngste Entwicklungs-Periode Ungarns (1857, repr. V., 1903; cf. below, n. 75), and his Erlebnisse (V./Bp., 1875). The phenomenon as a whole needs ¨ sterreich als ‘katholische Großmacht’, passim; and, further investigation. Cf. Till, Hofbauer; Mayer, O for Jarcke, Hans-Christof Kraus in HZ, 110 (1990), 409–45. 38 For assessments of Hurter, Ho ¨ fler, and others, see Heinrich von Srbik, Geist und Geschichte vom deutschen Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart (2 vols., Mun./Salzburg, 1951), ii. 33 ff., 75 ff. For the contemporary Austrian press: Deutsch-o¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Nagl, 353 ff. Other immigrant Catholic professors at this time included Wilhelm Heinrich Grauert (from Westphalia), Joseph Aschbach (from Nassau), J. B. Weiss (from the Breisgau), Karl Ernst von Moy (from Bavaria), and Johann Friedrich Schulte (from Bonn). Not all were of like mind—the last two being, respectively, a leading Ultramontane and a future Old Catholic. We should also remember that Romantic Catholicism was no Austrian or even grossdeutsch monopoly, as the example of Radowitz in Prussia (above, p. 234) shows. ´ gnes Dea´k, ‘Eo¨tvo¨s Jo´zsef e´s Lord Acton: tala´lkoza´s a liberalizmus e´s a nacionalizmuskritika 39 A metsze´spontjań’, Holmi, (1994), 25–36.

276


day, Anton Gu¨nther, were even placed on the Index.40 Second, and partly in consequence, the authorities faced running confessional battles, from the affair of a troublesome Evangelical pastor in Bohemia called (absit omen) Kossuth, to the toils of the new Patent which they sought to impose upon Protestants. The provisions of the Concordat, brought to bear on all sorts of test cases, turned out labyrinthine and divisive.41 Third, and most significantly, the German ingredient, welcome and natural up to a point, also contributed to a larger internal contradiction. Liberalism might have been presumptively seen off in the Austrian 1850s as a claim for political representation and constitutional forms—even the paranoid Metternich seemed convinced of that42—but this proved to be at the cost of assimilating much of its progressive, rational, and basically anticlerical ideology within the state apparatus. Hence, of course, the latter’s economic, administrative, and legal clout. Consider how many men of 1848 served the neoabsolutist regime. Bach (once the darling of the bourgeoisie, even students) may largely have crossed the floor, but other prominent Viennese reformers stuck to their guns: the Krauss brothers (one of them minister of justice); the agrarian experts Kleyle and Cajetan Meyer; Joseph Pipitz, who became director of the National Bank; the lawyer Anton Hye, editor of the Reichsgesetzblatt; Hock, the progressive Catholic who engineered a series of liberal trade treaties and edicts which fill page after page of that journal.43 Others had also been active at the Frankfurt Parliament. Anton von Schmerling, de facto premier of its executive, and Karl Ludwig Bruck resigned their Austrian portfolios when the new establishment took hold—but they soon reappeared as president of the court of cassation and minister of finance. Czoernig, whose intimate association with the regime is already familiar to us, had served at Frankfurt; likewise Burger, Perthaler, the Kalchberg brothers. . . . And again there 40 Bunnell, Before Infallibility, is an attractive guide to this abstruse subject. A similar, but more tragic case involved the Czech dissident priest, Augustin Smetana, whose funeral in Prague in 1851 created a great stir: see Springer, Aus meinem Leben, 183 ff.; Alfred Meissner, Ich traf auch Heine in Paris, ed. R. Weber (Berlin, 1973), 292–301; and especially Pavel Krˇivsky´, Augustin Smetana (Pr., 1989). 41 For the curious case of Friedrich Wilhelm Kossuth (also known as Bedr ˇich Vile´m Kosˇut), see his pamphlet, Mein Kerker und mein Exil (Elberfeld, 1860); cf. Christoph Sto¨lzl, Die A¨ra Bach in Bo¨hmen: Sozialgeschichtliche Studien zum Neoabsolutismus, 1849–59 (Munich/V., 1971), 131 n., 134 n., 225, 244 n. On the attempts to manage Protestant churches which culminated in the Patent of 1859, see Gottas, Frage der Protestanten. One test-case for the Concordat is described by Ge´za Buzinkay in Polga´rosoda´s Ko¨ze´p-Euro´pa´ban: Tanulmańyok Hana´k Pe´ter 70. szu¨lete´snapja´ra, ed. 42 e.g. Metternich—Hartig, ed. Hartig, 48. E´. Somogyi (Bp., 1991), 195–212, at 198–9. 43 Details about these men in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.vv.; cf. Georg Franz, Liberalismus: Die deutschliberale Bewegung in der Habsburgischen Monarchie (Mun., 1955), 61 ff. Although Hock also moved in clerical circles, his resentment at obscurantism was deeply felt, as remarks to Archbishop Schwarzenberg in 1849 reveal: ‘Da sind Leute wie Zenner, Rauscher und ihresgleichen, die im Sich-Verstecken, Hin- und Herbeugen, Schleichen, Kriechen, alten Beichtspiegeln und verkno¨cherten Kirchenrechten das Heil suchen; da stehen Jarcke, Hurter, etc., welche mit der ganzen neueren Zeit nichts anzufangen wissen und keine Hilfe sehen, als einen ¨ sterreich als ‘katholische Großmacht’, 142 n.). starken Ruck zuru¨ck ins Mittelalter’ (cited Mayer, O


277

were immigrants, who tended in this case to be Protestants. Most notably there was Bruck himself who, born at Elberfeld in the Prussian Rhineland, fetched up at Trieste as a young Byronic voyager to Greece, and became one of the founders of ¨ sterreichischer Lloyd.44 His secretary, Gustav Ho¨fken, from Westphalia, had the O a career as soldier, journalist, and economist behind him when hired by Bruck at Frankfurt.45 They were joined by such as Heinrich Ahrens, from Saxony, another Frankfurt deputy, radical philosopher, and professor at Graz; Ludwig Lewis, from Hamburg, refounder of Austrian Freemasonry as soon as circumstances allowed; the mordant north-German journalist Rogge, source for so many good stories, especially at the expense of the Catholic church; the famous social and political theorist Lorenz Stein, apostle of public administration (Verwaltung), and professor at Vienna from 1855.46 Not least I must mention Heinrich Laube, who swapped his career as rebel and parliamentarian to manage the Burgtheater; and the most celebrated German dramatist of the age, Friedrich Hebbel: a powerful literary duo indeed, even if in personal terms they failed to see eye-to-eye. Such arrivals bore witness to the attractiveness of the new Austrian state and its possibilities. Yet they also confirmed a stridency about German identity within it. A delicate balance had long existed between two poles of Austrian-German allegiance: ideological co-habitation was often not too hard, particularly while the first element connoted a more political, the second a more cultural affinity.47 But 1848 presented a dilemma. As Hebbel bluntly but perceptively put it, right at the beginning of the revolutionary year: ‘The dear Austrians! Now they are pondering how they can unite themselves with Germany, without uniting themselves with Germany.’48 More seriously, waves of enthusiasm for the national cause were henceforth channelled into a new cultural assertiveness, feeding on heady exposure to fresh initiatives in thought and letters after decades of comparative isolation.49 Only now did Austrian universities acquire chairs in the various branches of German jurisprudence, and even in German literature. 44 Richard Charmatz, Karl Ludwig von Bruck: Der Vorka ¨ mpfer Mitteleuropas (Leipzig, 1916), still an acceptable biography, despite its liberal and nationalist Tendenz. 45 Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen, 279–82, and ead. in Polga ´ rosoda´s, ed. Somogyi, 47–56. 46 Most of these figures have entries in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, and in more recent and orthodox bibliographical compendia (Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, Neue deutsche Biographie, ¨ sterreichisches biographisches Lexikon). Rogge’s memorably witty and racy Oesterreich von Vila´gos O bis zur Gegenwart, scourge of Jesuitical intrigue, Roman skulduggery, and much else which the regime held dear, needs to be handled with care, though it is essentially accurate. It is ironic that Stein, on whom see Giles Pope, ‘The Political Ideas of Lorenz Stein and their Influence on Rudolf Gneist and Gustav Schmoller’ (Ox. Univ. D. Phil. thesis, 1985), thought Austrian Verwaltung too complex for elucidation within his system. 47 R. J. W. Evans, ‘Josephinism, ‘‘Austrianness’’, and the Revolution of 1848’, in Austrian Studies, 2 (1991), 145–60. 48 Hebbel, Werke, ed. G. Fricke et al. (Mun., 1967), v. 17; cf. Evans, ‘Josephinism [and] ‘‘Austrianness’’ ’, 152 ff. 49 The extent of Austrian intellectual separation from (the rest of) Germany before 1848 is a ¨ sterreichischer Vorma¨rz und Goethezeit: Geschichte einer point of contention. Herbert Seidler, O literarischen Auseinandersetzung (V., 1982), seeks to minimize it, but develops no larger historical argument against the countervailing evidence.

278


German philosophy, especially in the form of Herbartism, swept through the lecture-halls, and a team of philologists arrived from Heidelberg, Breslau, Bonn, Wu¨rzburg, and elsewhere.50 The German tongue was introduced for practically all public purposes right across the area, and readily identified with the positive features of the new programme. As the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung condescendingly put it in 1850: ‘Material advantage will prove a much stronger force binding the populations of the various crownlands together than the right, devoutly desired by spokesmen of the nationalities, to turn Austria into a second Babylon.’51 It is no accident that the Reichsgesetzblatt, begun with a bold provision for publication in all the languages of Great Austria, appeared from 1852 in German alone; or that bureaucrats were so important as litte´rateurs in that language. ‘[Austria’s reforms] will’, so Stein asserted, ‘place the domestic Germanic element on an unshakeable base.’52 Ho¨fken and others sought settlers, particularly for the ‘barren wastes’ of Hungary.53 Few farmers came, but plenty of skilled workers, to join the teachers attracted by Thun and confirm the impression of a process of colonization. Moreover, a divergent appeal could be made to the same historical canon, especially to Joseph II, increasingly viewed as a German hero (since the 1848 revolution broke out on his birthday), and represented as the originator of modernizing, centralizing policies, in fact as the first ‘Josephinist’, a term coined at this time. Certainly there was a reminder of Joseph in the breathless pace and bewildering detail of neo-absolutist legislation. The compilers of a land survey of Hungary in the 1850s, finished within two years in truly Herculean fashion, recalled with pride that Joseph’s own cataster had had to be left incomplete after four.54 And an inspiration for his namesake on the throne: whereas Francis Joseph, like his eponymous predecessor, may have been more Germanized against than Germanizing, the dynasty never appeared so Teutonic in its ethos as during the 1850s and early 1860s. Linguistically speaking, not least, the court was, by Habsburg standards, comparatively monoglot, tending to discard old cosmopolitan means of communication (albeit Francis Joseph’s mother still kept her 50 Deutsch-o ¨ sterreich und die ¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Nagl, 12 ff.; Waltraud Heindl in O deutsche Frage im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Lutz and H. Rumpler (V., 1982), 73–91, at 82. 51 Cited in Sto ¨ lzl, A¨ra Bach, 58 n. See, in general, Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 593 ff. A typical case is examined by Helmut Slapnicka in Bohemia-Jahrbuch, 15 (1974), 158–70. 52 Pope, ‘Stein’, 201, and cf. below, n. 82. For the Reichsgesetzblatt: Helmut Slapnicka in Zeitschrift fu¨r Ostforschung, 23 (1974), 440–54. Deutsch-o¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Nagl, 212 ff. on bureaucrat authors. 53 Ho ¨ fken, Deutsche Auswanderung und Kolonisation mit Hinblick auf Ungarn (V., 1850). Heinrich von Srbik, Deutsche Einheit: Idee und Wirklichkeit vom Heiligen Reich bis Ko¨niggra¨tz (4 vols., Mun., 1935–42), ii. 150, 153, identifies these as mainly Catholic plans. Cf. Hubert ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 189–211, at 200. Lengauer in O 54 Brandt, Der o ¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 502 ff., esp. 504. Cf., for the 1780s initiative, P. G. M. Dickson, ‘Joseph II’s Hungarian Land Survey’, EHR 106 (1991), 611–34. For the term ‘Joseph[in]ism, cf. Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 288–91, 304–5.


279

diary in French), whereas the role of Hungarian or Czech was still entirely subordinate and largely formulaic. Marriage, of course, tied the dynasty to Germany even more closely at that time than at others.55 The irony of all this at a time when Josephinist regulation of the church was in process of dismantlement—to the glee of clerical satirists like Brunner56—does not ¨ sterreichische Geschichtsforschung should need stressing. Or that the Institut fu¨r O take on a young Protestant teacher from Anhalt, Theodor Sickel, who subsequently hijacked it into a centre for study of the German, not the Austrian, Reich. Even Thun, himself under pressure for the comparatively pluralist proclivities of his department, entertained no doubt about the irreducibly ‘German character of the state’;57 while the irreproachably multicultural Wurzbach, afforded no kind of official encouragement, had to rise at 5 a.m. each day to pursue his researches privately. It is instructive to cast a sidelong glance across the border to Bavaria, where a contemporaneous campaign to create patriotic feelings through church and administration, museums and ceremonies, and the sense of a common past achieved little more, it seems, than the continued wearing of Lederhosen.58

Such internal contradictions, beside external pressures, would soon show how the real motto for the first and main phase of the Austrian experiment might have been ‘sauter, pour mieux reculer’, the more so because of its sins of omission and commission in respect of other kinds of national sentiment. The ‘nationality question’ was alleged not to exist: declared initially to be just a matter of Gleichberechtigung, i.e. of equal rights, then (in the Silvester Patents) merely equality before the law. Vernacular languages gained certain (grudging) guarantees, at least in the education system, as part of an essentially ethnographical vision of Austria’s ‘family of peoples’.59 The notorious ‘hussar’ uniforms—a charge on their wearers of up to half an annual salary, and arousing either 55 Historians do not quite agree on the calculations associated with the choice of (a) regnal name(s) for the new Emperor: cf. Redlich, Emperor Francis Joseph, 29; Bled, Franz Joseph, 3, 48. But before 1848 he had been generally known as ‘Franz’. Judgements about his and his family’s ethnic ¨ sterreich und sensibilities must be very impressionistic: cf. below, p. 289. Cf. Brigitte Hamann in O die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 212–30. 56 Renatus [J. M. H.] Ritzen, Der junge Sebastian Brunner in seinem Verha ¨ ltnis zu Jean Paul, Anton Gu¨nther und Fu¨rst Metternich (Nijmegen, 1927), a defective work, but useful in this connection. 57 Urban, C ˇeska´ spolecˇnost, 92 f. An instance of Thun’s dilemma is recorded by Waltraud Heindl ¨ sterreichische Osthefte, 20 (1978), 79–98. in O 58 Manfred Hanisch, Fu ¨ r Fu¨rst und Vaterland: Legitimita¨tsstiftung in Bayern zwischen Revolution 1848 und deutscher Einheit (Mun., 1991). But cf. above, p. 130 and n. 59 Magisterial survey of the general issue by Gerald Stourzh, Die Gleichberechtigung der Nation¨ sterreichs, 1848–1918 (V., 1985), 17 ff. Matauschek, alita¨ten in der Verfassung und Verwaltung O Normalien-Nachschlagebuch, 35–41, 58–64, 158–9, 269–70, etc., indicates the language provisions in schools. Cf. Klaus Frommelt, Die Sprachenfrage im o¨sterreichischen Unterrichtswesen, 1848–59 (Graz/Cologne, 1963), a collection of documents whose commentary reads like an 1850s manifesto itself. The authentic formulation is in Czoernig, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 593 ff.: ‘Wo aber die wissenschaftliche Ausbildung beginnt, da treten die ethnographischen Anforderungen in den

280


obsequiousness or disdain—were actually envisaged as a concession to Hungarian sensibilities.60 More was seen as unnecessary and undesirable—the exception to prove the rule being the Italian provinces, where German culture was kept at bay, yet disloyalty remained chronic. This handling of the nationality issue must be seen as resting on a double miscalculation: a policy flawed in itself, which additionally compromised a regime exposed to so many other challenges. But we need to seek to understand the mandate for such ideological blindness towards the consequences of invading non-German cultural space—space which the Vorma¨rz state had left largely inviolate. Native and newcomer, Carl Czoernig and Bernhard Meyer, vied with each other in patronizing comments about the puny velleities of the semibarbarous local peoples, especially in Hungary. Literary giants uttered withering comments in public and private: Franz Grillparzer, on how Kant’s first Critique would have sold only three copies in Magyar, and how ‘Czech nationality has only a single flaw, that it isn’t one’;61 Anastasius Gru¨n, shifting from patronage to contempt for Slovene letters; Hebbel, Stifter, or Bauernfeld.62 Yet disdain for other ethnic claims only gradually proved disastrous. The Slavs had, ironically, just brought tribute in explicitly Austrian coin to the dynasty: the ‘Austro-Slav’ programme of loyalty to the great-power interests of the state in return for political concessions, which had been adumbrated in a famous slogan of Frantisˇek Palacky´’s, and developed by the Czech leadership.63 The sentiment was unrequited, indeed condemned, with the exile of its most tenacious spokesman, Karel Havlıćˇek, who insisted—vis-a`-vis Thun—on a ‘total implementation of equal rights’, refusing to be cast in the role of (as he put it) a ‘wretched and despised Irishman’.64 Meanwhile Palacky´, a Protestant into the Hintergrund, und es wird zuna¨chst darauf gesehen, ob die Sprache des bezu¨glichen Volksstammes eine Cultur Sprache sei . . .’ For the ‘große Familie von Vo¨lkern, welche zusammen das Kaiserreich bilden’, see e.g. Meyer, Ru¨ckblick, 2. 60 Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, i. 321–3; Acht Jahre (above, n. 20), 15, describes the uniform with kalpak and sabre, atilla and mente, boots and spurs, and tights, which its wearer was unable to don or doff unaided. Cf. above, p. 204. 61 ‘Die tschechische Nationalita ¨t . . . welche Nationalita¨t nur den Fehler hat, daß sie keine ist, so wie die Tschechen keine Nation sind, sondern ein Volksstamm, und ihre Sprache nichts mehr und nichts weniger [!] als ein Dialekt’: Grillparzer, Sa¨mtliche Werke, vol. iv (Mun., 1965), 214. Surveys of Grillparzer’s comments on this subject in August Ehrhard, Franz Grillparzer: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Mun., 1902), 87 ff.; Wilhelm Bu¨cher, Grillparzers Verha¨ltnis zur Politik seiner Zeit ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, (Marburg, 1913), 146 ff.; Lengauer in O 203 ff.; Anthony Grenville, in The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness, ed. H. T. Mason and W. Doyle (Gloucester, 1989), 172–87. We must not, however, overlook his proclaimed distaste for the whole phenomenon of nationalism, including its German version. 62 Some examples in Lengauer, O ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler; Deutscho¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Nagl, 123 ff. (Hebbel). 63 ‘If the Austrian imperial state had not long existed, it would be necessary, in the interests of Europe and of humanity itself, to create it with all speed.’ For the circumstances of this statement, cf. above, pp. 98, 202. 64 Urban, loc. cit. (n. 57 above). Cf., in general, Jakub Maly ´ , Nasˇe znovuzrozenı´: Prˇehled na´rodnı´ho zˇivota ˇceske´ho za poslednı´ho pu˚lstoletı´ (4 vols., Pr., 1880–3), vol. iii.


281

bargain, crept into the shadows to lick his wounds. Sepulchral quiet reigned in 1850s Bohemia on the national front, and many Czechs were drawn into the state apparatus. It was fashionable and profitable to be ‘Johann Mieschtian’ rather than ‘Jan Meˇˇst’an’.65 A local journalist could even write in 1856, about Czech–German relations there: The mutual impact which these different peoples exert on one another, the resulting competition and choice of employment according to talent and inclination, which have led to a general division of labour, are surely responsible for many fortunate consequences here. Far from Bohemia suffering in its development from differences between its nationalities, it owes to them the eminent position which it occupies among the crownlands of the Monarchy.66

A starry-eyed view, for sure. Yet there was some mandate for it in the despondency of Czech representatives. ‘Particular Slavdom makes no sense nowadays’, wrote one; ‘the solidarity of world conditions has become so marked, that particularist tendencies must become mere utopias.’ The historian Gindely thought in the mid-1850s that the ‘bo¨hmische Nationalsache’ was lost beyond recovery.67 Hungary was different. There could be no doubt about the existence of a national cause there, or about official rejection of all its works. The Hungarians were rebels, who had offended against the dynastic-military foundation of Habsburg sovereignty—Francis Joseph actually took the field against them personally—and whose rights were consequently forfeit (verwirkt). Then a Hungarian tailor’s apprentice tried to assassinate the Emperor on the streets of his capital (the man couldn’t even speak German to his captors, fulminated Hebbel, clear evidence that you can’t trust metics 68). Fresh from completing the Arsenal, Vienna’s masons were redeployed on a comparably massive votive church to commemorate the Emperor’s deliverance. Bach’s tendency to refer to the ‘former kingdom of Hungary’, and Albrecht’s post at the head of a so-called General-Gouvernement (sinister appellation in light of the twentieth-century Central-European experience), provide better clues than Meyer’s protestations that some statehood survived.69 Hence a fateful alienation of the considerable potential support there, led by the so-called ‘old conservative’ nobles. Their measured, conciliatory disapproval was registered in print by Somssich as early as 1850; and Hungary’s leading 65 As Urban neatly puts it, in his brief survey of Czech society in these years: C ˇeska´ spolecˇnost, 123 ff. at 130. ‘Sepulchral’ was a contemporary Czech perception too: viz. Jan Neruda’s literary debut—herald of the subsequent revival—which appeared in 1857 under the title Hrˇbitovnı´ kvı´tı´. Cf. Sto¨lzl, A¨ra Bach, passim; Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914 (Princeton, 1981), 34 ff. The subject needs further treatment, to explain the backgrounds 66 Sto ¨ lzl, A¨ra Bach, 309 n. and career choices of such men as Hock and Helfert. 67 Ibid., 67 and n. Cf. Maly ´ , Znovuzrozenı´ (n. 64 above), vol. iv; Korˇalka, Tschechen im Habsburgerreich, esp. 27–37, 44–51. 68 Hebbel, Werke, v. 115–17: ‘. . . Sollte das nicht ein Wink sein, nirgends das Fundament des Throns zu suchen, als in Deutschland, und also Deutschland und deutsches Element zu kra¨ftigen?’ 69 Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, i. 271, 274, 276. Meyer, Ru ¨ ckblick, 9 ff. passim.

282


political theorist, Eo¨tvo¨s, most thoughtful of all contemporary defenders of Habsburg sovereignty, remained strongly Austrocentric in his writings throughout the decade.70 So did the perceptive and sardonic journalist Kecskeme´thy, who in 1856 confided to his diary: ‘I’m more of a Magyar than a Czech or a German, but above all I’m a citizen of the Austrian Empire, and only as such am I a Magyar.’71 Yet the Old Conservatives were denounced by Francis Joseph as ‘the most reprehensible and base party in the state’, precisely because they were seen as an organized grouping capable of opposition, and because the inconsistency, which they pointed out, of imputing general guilt to the inhabitants of a realm, while claiming popular support for governmental measures there, touched too raw a nerve.72 The conservatives still tried in vain for a breakthrough in 1857, when the Emperor made a ceremonious visit to his Potemkin non-kingdom. In a nice episode, the ruler was greeted at the new pierhead in the lakeside spa of Balatonfu¨red by the assembled—corralled—faithful; but since its construction was incomplete, the local dignitaries actually had to stand knee-deep in the water.73 By then it was still too early for the Austrian experiment to attain its ends in Hungary: Bach said he needed twenty-five years there, ‘then we have won the game for ever’.74 But it was probably already too late to prevent an explosion of resentment if the regime’s overall strategy failed. The cosy platitudes of Meyer’s Ru¨ckblick were met by the devastating satire of Szećhenyi’s Blick, from one who had done his utmost to sustain Austrian government before the revolution.75 Szećhenyi’s outburst coincided with uproar about the introduction—after years in gestation—of new state regulation of the Protestant churches, which enforced upon them the kind of Josephinist controls just conceded to the papacy in respect of Catholics. The unrest assailed a government suddenly losing direction and impetus. 70 Pa ´l Somssich, Das legitime Recht Ungarns und seines Ko¨nigs (V., 1850), boldly argues that the new regime is illegitimate, but denies that Hungary nourishes any kind of ‘Haß gegen die Gesammtmonarchie’. This aspect of Eo¨tvo¨s’s thought, little acknowledged by Hungarian historians, is well analysed by Gerald Stourzh in his Wege zur Grundrechtsdemokratie: Studien zur Begriffs- und Institutionengeschichte des liberalen Verfassungsstaates (V., 1989), 217–37; cf. Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt.1, 553–71; Ga´bor Gańgo´, Eo¨tvo¨s Jo´zsef az emigraćio´ban (Debrecen, 1999). Cf. also 71 Buzinkay in Polga ´ rosoda´s, ed. Somogyi, 206. above, p. 258 f. 72 ‘Die verwerflichste und schlechteste Partei im Staate’: Francis Joseph to his chief of police in 1852, in J. I. Mayr (ed.), Das Tagebuch des Polizeiministers Kempen (V., 1931), 247. Cf. Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, i. 195 ff., 257 ff., ii. 117–19, 157 ff., and passim; Schmidt-Brentano, Armee, 358 ff. This contradiction within the doctrine of Verwirkung was soon to be exposed most trenchantly by Szećhenyi, Blick (below, n. 75), 23 ff. and passim. 73 Rogge, Oesterreich, i. 480 ff.; Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, ii. 112 ff. 74 ‘Dann haben wir fu ¨ r immer gewonnenes Spiel’: quoted from Rogge, Oesterreich, i. 359. 75 Meyer, Ru ¨ ckblick; Szećhenyi, Blick auf den anonymen ‘Ru¨ckblick’. As Szećhenyi’s full title (cf. above, ch. 14, n. 40) implies, the Ru¨ckblick, a short and feeble piece of government propaganda, attained prominence only through his massive, and likewise anonymous, demolition of it. Beneath its memorable invective (cf. below, p. 285), the Blick makes a compelling case for the conservative critique of the regime which I have just outlined.


283

The beginning of 1859, when Szećhenyi’s tirades began to circulate in Austria, already featured in the regime’s plans as a turning point. The National Loan, floated as a wedding gift to the Emperor in 1854, and hugely successful, albeit largely on Morton’s Fork principles, was set to be fully subscribed by then.76 On the strength of this, convertibility of the gulden, the condition for a new currency treaty with other German states which would help compensate for continuing exclusion from the Zollverein, had been resolved upon for 1 January. But economic trends gave rise to increased anxiety, as the Monarchy suffered disproportionately from the Europe-wide recession, and its budgetary deficit could be funded only, and then inadequately, by a programme of railway privatization. The still sanguine Bruck was about to earn his epithet as Austria’s Necker.77 The very same day, the anniversary of the introduction of naked absolutism in 1852, the imminence of war with France over Italy became clear— it will be recalled that Louis Napoleon reacted very differently to the attempt on his life by an Austrian gaolbreaker called Orsini.78 Within a further six months, the military machine had broken down at Magenta and Solferino, bankrupting the government and shattering its prestige. Seven fat years of the Austrian state idea were to be swallowed by seven lean years.79 Of course, Austria’s problem had always been an international one, with the occupational hazard for her rulers that policies appropriate domestically might not suit the larger Central-European context. The Metternichian system operated as a kind of dual dualism: partnership with Prussia in the German Confederation (Bund); and a loose deal with Hungary at home. In the aftermath of revolution, the latter was swept away;80 and the former, too, seemed modified to Austrian advantage: more grossdeutsch than kleindeutsch, in the parlance of the time, and with encouragement to the ‘great-Austrian’ ideal of an at least loosely unified Reich from Baltic to Adriatic. There has been desultory debate about this. Did Schwarzenberg really seek an empire of seventy million people, and the 76 Brandt, Der o ¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 692 ff. Metternich, who subscribed 100,000 fl., was allegedly lectured by the chief of police on his duty to give more: Sto¨lzl, A¨ra Bach, 74 n. 77 Brandt, Der o ¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 712 ff., and Schmidt-Brentano, Armee, 124 ff., differ as to the extent of the army’s responsibility for the deficit. Cf. Beer, Finanzen, 259 ff. 78 Orsini’s indictment of Austrian tyranny, The Austrian Dungeons in Italy (L., 1856), achieved a special entry when prohibited in the Reichsgesetzblatt 1856, XLIV Stu¨ck, Nr. 179 (3 Oct. 1856). For the diplomatic background, see A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (L., 1954, repr.1971), 99 ff.; F. R. Bridge, in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, vi, pt. 1, 218 ff. 79 Hu ¨ bner, the recipient of Napoleon’s famous New Year snub, is especially interesting on the in-fighting within the regime during 1859, as neo-absolutism began to implode: Monarchia Austriaca dopo Villafranca. 80 Cf., as evidence of this terminology, the interesting comment by Hartig to Metternich in August 1851: ‘The only true achievement since your departure from Vienna, the destruction of the earlier dualism in the government of the Kaiserreich, was, as I must testify, always the target of your desires’: Metternich—Hartig, ed. Hartig, 103 ff. Whether Metternich had actually sought that goal is a moot point; if so, then on the whole he seems to have preferred some sort of estates constitutionalism as the common denominator, rather than absolutism. For a less generous interpretation, see Andics, Metternich. Cf. above, p. 263.

284


subordination of Prussia? Or did he rather display a neo-Metternichian respect for the status quo, confirmed by his lacklustre successor Buol?81 He failed to achieve the first, but got—in great-Austrian eyes—rather more than the second, enough to give offence at Frankfurt to the rancorous Bismarck through the complacent behaviour of Francis Joseph’s envoys to the Bund, Friedrich Thun (Leo’s brother) and the extravagant Prokesch von Osten. Stein spoke of Austria’s progress towards ‘undoubted predominance in Germany’.82 If so, it was credit which could not be banked, as the Crimea soon showed. The war was not really the cause of Austria’s future misfortunes, as often supposed; rather the symptom of an existing ideological quandary. She did not want to fall in with either West or East—that was the arrogance of the Austrian experiment.83 Anyway she could not: strategic considerations aside, association with Russia would involve fatal loss of dignity, flexibility, and socio-economic impetus, defeating the whole purpose of neo-absolutist regeneration; but the West was the home of alien values, from the conspiracies of Hungarian emigre´s to what the Emperor dismissed as the ‘so-called English-French constitutional principle’.84 In order to sustain that neutral posture, Austria needed German support, which was not forthcoming. Nor did it materialize, as the government had confidently anticipated, in 1859, when the Bund recognized no casus foederis in northern Italy. The bitter tone of Francis Joseph’s ensuing Laxenburg manifesto hints at the extent of the miscalculation.85 In this sudden crisis of confidence, 81 Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert (Ithaca, NY, 1972), and Roy A. Austensen in Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980), 193–225, argue for considerable continuity of policy, including personal interventions by the old Chancellor (see also below, n. 88). Contrast Bo¨hme, Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht, and earlier—from a different perspective—Srbik, Deutsche Einheit, ii. 123–42 and passim. Cf. Michael ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 92–116, and id. in Die Derndarsky in O deutsche Frage im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. J. Becker and A. Hillgruber (Mun., 1982), 64–90. 82 ‘[A reformed Austria] wird einerseits das herrschende germanische Element in seinen eigenen Staaten auf unerschu¨tterliche Basis stellen,’—thus far the quotation from the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung translated above, p. 278—‘und andererseits in Deutschland die unbezweifelte Pra¨ponderanz haben’: Pope, loc. cit. (n. 52 above). Such remarks earned him Treitschke’s riposte: ‘Stein was such a sophist, he deserved to become an Austrian’: ibid. 300. For Bismarck’s ‘borussische Entru¨stung u¨ber die geringscha¨tzige und verletzende Art der Behandlung, die wir von der Politik Buol–Prokesch erfuhren’, see his Gedanken und Erinnerungen (1898; new edn., Stuttgart/ Berlin, 1913), i. 124. 83 A point well made by Harm-Hinrich Brandt in his contribution to Die Kaiser der Neuzeit, 1519–1918, ed. A. Schindling and W. Ziegler (Mun., 1990), 341–81, at 355 ff. 84 Quoted in Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 2, 127 ff. Actually the model for the Austrian constitution of 1848 had been Belgium, i.e. the ex-Austrian Netherlands. Schroeder, Crimean War, 27 ff., 138 ff., 157 ff., and passim, gives a good analysis of Austrian reasons for deserting Russia. The novelist, Adalbert Stifter, for one, felt that Austria was in lonely occupation of the moral high ground at this time: ‘Seit meiner Vereinsamung und seit ich gegen Europas Ma¨chte, ¨ sterreichs das Recht und die oberste Sitte aus Selbstsucht und Feigheit oder welche mit Ausnahme O wenigstens Schwa¨che fallen ließen, eine so tiefe Verachtung fu¨hle, sind mir meine Arbeiten Rettung und Trost geworden . . .’: Sa¨mtliche Werke (24 vols., Pr./Reichenberg, 1904–39), xix. 188. 85 ‘Der warmen und dankbar anzuerkennenden Theilnahme ohngeachtet, welche Unsere gerechte Sache in dem gro¨ßten Theile von Deutschland bei den Regierungen, wie bei den Vo¨lkern gefunden hat, haben sich Unsere a¨ltesten und natu¨rlichen Bundesgenossen hartna¨ckig der


285

Foreign Minister Buol wrote a revealing memorandum which indicted the whole system: powerful stuff, we might say, even from one who had not been as closely involved with it as he had—until we take up the magnificently withering satire of Szećhenyi on Schwarzenberg, that ‘rotten-souled voluptuary’, ‘vampire thirsting for human blood’, whose ‘unexampled heartlessness has been matched only by his most deplorable ignorance in the affairs of state’, and on Bach, the ‘miserable dwarf’ and ‘genuine charlatan’.86 Austria was pushed into a ‘new era’:87 but one of limited restructuring, not dismantlement. For all the fresh leadership—Bach and Buol were unceremoniously dismissed, in favour of the Pole Gołuchowski and Metternich’s prote´ge´ Rechberg88, and a little later Leo Thun followed them out of office—the regime remained a squarely dynastic instrument, and as yet undertook only one significant strategic change to broaden its base: readmission of the constitutional principle. Even this took place initially by the back door, and with protestations of continuity. Francis Joseph had, after all, proclaimed a Verfassung exactly a decade before and toyed with implementing some of it; then had introduced a pliant Imperial Council (Reichsrat) as the only chink in the authoritarian carapace.89 Bach’s long-promised law on communal semi-autonomy reached the statute-book just four days before war broke out: typically it ran to 346 paragraphs; equally typically, it was never put into effect.90 Now, however, that was because it did not go far enough. We can identify three phases of constitutional shift, which served three overlapping purposes (but before engaging with them I should make clear that I mean to skirt the increasingly bewildering intricacies and peripateias of this political landscape, in order to keep the fate of the 1850s edifice firmly in view). First the advisory functions of the Reichsrat were expanded, still in corporative Erkenntnis verschlossen, welche hohe Bedeutung die große Frage des Tages in sich trug’: qu. ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 218–19. German responses Hamann in O were anyway hindered by (the speed of) Austria’s pre-emptive aggression, the fact that Lombardy was not part of the Confederation, and disputes about supreme command over the Bund’s troops. 86 Buol’s ‘Denkschrift’ is in Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 2, 234–40. Sze ćhenyi, Blick, 435–70. 87 The term ‘neue A ¨ ra’ is normally applied to Prussia from the assumption of power by William I (initially as regent) in 1858. Its applicability to Austria is perceived by Sheehan, German History, 869 ff. Here is not the place to indicate the mass either of contemporary or of subsequent literature about the new, largely uncensored, political processes in the Habsburg lands. There is a characteristically authoritative treatment of the ‘Eight Years of Experiment’, 1859–67, in Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 495–568. 88 This recommendation, Metternich’s last service to the Habsburgs before his death a few months later, was made when the Emperor paid him a visit for the first time in years, another sign of the times: Hu¨bner, Monarchia Austriaca dopo Villafranca, 91 f. 89 Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 1, 382 ff., who documents the central role of Ku ¨ beck (cf. above, p. 272) in the genesis of the Reichsrat, as guarantor of its deference. None of the representative or elective provisions of the Constitution of 4 March 1849 were actually implemented (though the chambers of commerce set up in some towns did possess certain minimal consultative features): see ibid. 338 ff., and the clear exposition in Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 90 Rogge, Oesterreich, i. 498–500. 422 ff.

286


(landsta¨ndisch) terms, and it was allowed to grow milk teeth of consent— ‘zustimmende Befugnisse’, then ‘verfassungsma¨ßige Mitwirkung’, in the coded language of the time. Domestic and foreign creditors needed to be satisfied in the short run and solvency restored—as well as certain anti-Jewish enactments modified, given that the government’s chief creditors included Rothschilds et al. Moreover, Bruck had resorted to overselling the loan, and that and related scandals drove him to suicide.91 This Reichsrat now, secondly, in October 1860, pushed the government into summoning fuller representative bodies. Itself further afforced as a supreme diet, it should be matched by provincial assemblies elected on a carefully restricted curial franchise, in order to conciliate the aristocracy, above all in Hungary, whose vested interests were at last given some priority.92 But what might conceivably have satisfied regional aspirations there a decade before now yielded only uncontrollable pressure for more. The Old Conservatives won a momentary triumph, but found themselves hoist with their own petard, as the inept decision for immediate revival of the county congregations, followed—but only six months later—by a diet, opened up Pandora’s box. A spectre was unleashed still deeply troubling to the imperial soul: ‘that dualism between Hungary and the extra-Hungarian parts of the Monarchy, which is certainly above all things to be avoided’.93 Within six months a third, diagonal, move onward ostensibly only clarified and augmented the Octobrist arrangements, but in fact brought an important shift of emphasis: to full parliamentary life under the so-called Patent (as arcane a description as ‘Diploma’ had been for its predecessor).94 Now it was intended to woo the grossdeutsch constituency at home and abroad. Who better than the man of the moment, Schmerling, (unwisely) sprung into power by the Old Conservatives, and taken up by Francis Joseph with some reluctance, but an Admirable Crichton for the Austro-German generation of 1848, and for 91 Beer, Finanzen, 297 ff.; Brandt, Der o ¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus, 813 ff., esp. 874–86. For the need to conciliate Jewish interests, see ibid. 830 f., 872–4. The mixed experiences of Austrian Jews in the 1850s cannot be entered into here: the reparations demanded from Hungarian communities and discriminatory regulations, especially in relation to landholding, on which see La´szlo´ Gonda, A zsido´sa´g Magyarorsza´gon, 1526–1945 (Bp., 1992), 90 ff., would need to be set alongside their evident material advance there and elsewhere. 92 Imperial Diploma of 20 Oct. 1860, in Reichsgesetzblatt 1860, LIV Stu ¨ ck, Nr. 226; also in Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 2, 228 f.; commentary ibid., pt. 1, 572 ff. Hu¨bner grumbled that, even as late as the ministerial debates of mid-1859, Hungary still ‘n’existait pas pour ces Messieurs’: Monarchia Austriaca dopo Villafranca, 109. Cf. above, pp. 258 ff. 93 Qu. Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii. 692, 695. Cf. Eisenmann, Compromis austrohongrois, 232 ff. 94 The imperial decree of 26 Feb. 1861, in Reichsgesetzblatt 1861, IX Stu ¨ ck, Nr. 20, also in Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, i, pt. 2, 229–34, is not actually described as a ‘Patent’, or indeed given any title at all. Perhaps the officials involved were too busy preparing the 240 pages of ¨ G, appendixes to it, issued on the same day. Commentary ibid., pt. 1, 768 ff.; Fritz Fellner in MIO 63 (1955), 549–64, who stresses aspects of continuity in this legislation, and the close involvement with it of Francis Joseph; and the brilliant critique by Eisenmann, Compromis austro-hongrois, 260–304, who sees the Patent as a fraud to save the reality of Bachian absolutism.


287

informed foreign commentators like Acton? Meanwhile the rampant Hungarian political nation totally rejected the powers of the new central parliament.

Two years are a very long time in politics. The Austrian dynast and his government were learning to manoeuvre in a much more open arena. Yet—what matters to this argument—1850s priorities stayed uppermost in this quasi-Liberal Empire. Hungary’s insubordination was visited with what may be described as ‘neo-neoabsolutism’: a further dose of Austrian bureaucracy, law, and the rest. A curious condition of reversed dualism now obtained, opposite to that of the Vorma¨rz, with constitutional processes established west of the river Leitha, but revoked to the east. The Reichsrat (Imperial Council—a paternalist designation deliberately retained for the new legislative body) was still largely subject to the will of ruler and central administration, with which Schmerling identified himself. Oppositional forces—liberal critics of the army and church, and Slav and other federalist claimants—were still puny.95 Schmerling, sanguine about cementing the rest of the Austrian ideal, appealed to grossdeutsch solidarity in the rest of the Confederation. Pan-German enthusiasm, evidenced by the nationwide Schillerfest of 1859,96 was now intensified by a widespread sense of backlash, what Hebbel called ‘racial conspiracy’,97 on the part of other nationalities. Here we are suddenly on very familiar ground. I do not presume to enter into any reinterpretation of that ‘Struggle for Supremacy in Germany’ to which Friedjung and others devoted justly celebrated analyses, and Srbik six volumes of documents.98 Austria certainly did not mean to rock the Confederacy’s boat, and the situation might have been sustainable for the foreseeable future, given Prussian goodwill towards some version of the status quo (which was no zerosum game anyway). But the Habsburgs did need to consolidate support in Germany, given their continuing over-commitment on other fronts. For Francis Joseph that meant clinging to princely brotherhood, despite his disappointment in 1859—a mentality still deeply conditioned by the circumstances of his own political legitimation. He grasped at the Frankfurt Fu¨rstentag in 1863—a 95 Disappointment with the incompleteness of ministerial responsibility and parliamentary sovereignty under the Patent, and with Schmerling’s connivance at it, can be traced through the account in Rogge, Oesterreich, ii. 92 ff. 96 For the celebrations on the centenary of Friedrich Schiller’s birth, cf. Srbik, Deutsche Einheit, ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 207 ff. iii. 23–5; Lengauer in O 97 ‘Man muß vielleicht in O ¨ sterreich leben, um zu erfahren, in welchem Grade der deutsche Name jetzt gehaßt wird, und wie notwendig es ist . . . gegen die uns von allen Seiten drohende Rassenverschwo¨rung geru¨stet zu sein’: quoted in Deutsch-o¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Nagl, 8. 98 Heinrich Friedjung, Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft in Deutschland, 1859–66 (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1897–8); revised and abridged as The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 1859–66, trans. A. J. P. Taylor and W. L. McElwee (L., 1935). Heinrich von Srbik, Quellen zur deutschen Politik ¨ sterreichs, 1859–66 (6 vols., Berlin, 1934–8); cf. id., Deutsche Einheit, vols. iii–iv. Accessible O introduction in William Carr, Origins of the Wars of German Unification (L., 1991).

288


meeting of the club of crowned heads alone—as ‘a final means of saving German rulers from ruin in the face of the revolution’.99 From the Austrian regime came more confusing signals, likewise a legacy of 1850s’ attitudes. Schmerling exemplified a liberal reformist element, not inconsiderable in itself (as, for example, his new communal legislation showed100), but condemned to be a quantite´ ne´gligeable, trumped by Prussia and the Nationalverein, and lamed by fears among the Austrian commercial bourgeoisie about free trade. The main appeal of Austria—apart from to grossdeutsch democrats who followed in the footsteps of Marx and Engels and did nothing for the official marketability of the cause101—remained squarely Catholic and conservative. Foreign minister Rechberg himself, and his counsellors Biegeleben, Gagern, and Meysenbug, were immigrant clericals to a man, in terms of their origins; as, in his way, was the shadowy ultramontane francophone éminence grise, Esterha´zy. They planned for new institutional arrangements among the German states, with a federal Bundesrat and indirectly elected Bundesversammlung, rather akin to the closely controlled package just enacted for the Habsburg Monarchy itself; but their constituency was simply not large enough if things came to a crunch. ‘Whoever has followed the history of the last fifteen years’, said Biegeleben to the Reichsrat in the mid-1860s, ‘knows that Austria has always stayed on the defensive against Prussia; all the confrontations had the effect of forcing her, in order to sustain her German position, to act as she has acted.’102 There can be no doubt that the German question formed the central international priority of the Austrian Emperor through these years. Italian possessions were ultimately dispensable, as the diplomacy of 1866 would show, if face could somehow be saved.103 Balkan ambitions, though the Crimea had placed them 99 Quoted in Bled, Franz Joseph, 132. For the Fu ¨ rstentag, see Srbik, Deutsche Einheit, iv. 1–77; and Norbert Wehner, Die deutschen Mittelstaaten auf dem Frankfurter Fu¨rstentag, 1863 (Frankfurt, 1993), who does not quite prove his claim that it yielded a ‘decision that Austria would not remain in the Bund’. 100 Heffter, Deutsche Selbstverwaltung, 313 f., 325–7, 445 ff., 536–8, etc.; Klabouch, Gemeindeselbstverwaltung, 54 ff. 101 See Nicholas M. Hope, The Alternative to German Unification: The Anti-Prussian Party: Frankfurt, Nassau, and the Two Hessen, 1859–67 (Wiesbaden, 1973); Ernst Hanisch, Der kranke ¨ sterreich (V./Munich/Zurich, 1978), 322 ff. Mann an der Donau: Marx und Engels u¨ber O 102 The evidence, for a significant part of the ‘Third Germany’, is laid out in Hope, Alternative to German Unification; cf. Srbik, Deutsche Einheit, iii. 167–262, and Jirˇ´ı Korˇalka, in Die Habsburgermonarchie, ed. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch, vi, pt. 2, 1–158, at 31 ff. On Rechberg: Friedrich ¨ sterreichs Geschichte (Mun., 1927); Richard Engel-Janosi, Graf Rechberg: Vier Kapitel zu seiner und O B. Elrod in Journal of Modern History, 55 (1984), 430–55. On the other diplomats, see Ru¨diger von Biegeleben, Ludwig Freiherr von Biegeleben: Ein Vorka¨mpfer des großdeutschen Gedankens (V., 1930), a fairly anodyne biographical compilation (quoted at 285); Srbik, iii. 121 ff.; Friedjung, Struggle for Supremacy, 77 ff., a very negative portrayal of Esterha´zy. 103 Partly for that reason I have neglected the Italian dimension in the domestic policy of the Austrian experiment, though it merits attention. For the last phase of its diplomatic implications, see Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 159 ff. For the (powerful) administrative machinery there, see ¨ sterreichischer Verwaltungsstaat und administrative Eliten im Ko¨nigreich Brigitte Mazohl-Wallnig, O Lombardo-Venetien, 1815–59 (Mainz, 1993).


289

squarely on the agenda, were no substitute, till he had to make a virtue out of necessity. Francis Joseph’s protestations of being a ‘German prince’, though not to be conceived in any squarely national sense, signified rather more, I think, in the overall grossdeutsch context, than the residual, neutral interpretation recently accorded them.104 Yet the vicious circle of Habsburg sovereignty—how much easier for a king of Prussia, who could embrace the two worlds without schizophrenia!—meant that he needed a broader and securer platform in Austria too. Schmerling failed to deliver it. ‘We can wait’, he claimed, in a notoriously conceited slogan.105 But that proved fruitless, especially since his government could not contemplate a genuine appeal to the people over the heads of the elites, in order to fill empty seats in the Reichsrat. The Emperor reverted to Schmerling’s aristocratic rivals, dismissing him with no more respect than his predecessors, and installing Count Richard Belcredi (brother of that frondeur of the fifties whom we encountered earlier). Francis Joseph was even ready to build a bridge to the Slavs, provided they were prepared to accept Catholic-conservative tutelage and function as honorary Austrians. At the same time he parleyed seriously with Hungarians for the first time, in the context of a curious transformation of the attitudes of the latter towards the German-Austrian space. Cultural dictatorship had only hardened their national feeling: Schillerfeste were matched by Kazinczy-u¨nnepek, in honour of another national poet born in 1759.106 But the weaker version of autocracy after 1861 weighed less heavily on their intellectual life. They could vent their spleen more freely; and the objects of their resentment were perceived as ‘Austrian’ institutions. Germany, after all, now appeared a bastion of progress again. Thus Hungarian leaders, while remaining opposed to all entanglements of an essentially Confederal kind—Dea´k in 1861 famously insisted that ‘their wars are not our wars’107—did not mind some Habsburg consolidation in Germany. They had begun to grasp, before Vienna did, that since the great-Austrian arch could not be held in place indefinitely, this would tend to reduce direct pressure upon themselves. At the same time they remembered, what Vienna had forgotten, that Habsburg great power, even in attenuated form, could only be securely grounded on voluntary recognition of its utility by non-Austrian political elites within the Monarchy.108 The next step would thus lie with Andra´ssy, the European diplomat, rather than with Dea´k, the country squire. 104 As by Brandt in Die Kaiser der Neuzeit, ed. Schindling and Ziegler, 345; Bled, Franz Joseph, ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 221–2. Cf. the 127; even Hamann, in O Emperor’s comment of September 1862, cited in Deutsch-o¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. ¨ sterreicher, aber entschieden deutsch, und wu¨nsche den innigsten Nagl, 9: ‘Ich bin vor allem O 105 Macartney, Habsburg Empire, 530 and passim. ¨ sterreichs an Deutschland’. Anschluß O 106 Berzeviczy, Az absolutismus kora, ii. 418–20. 107 Cited from his text for the diet’s first Address to the Crown in Dea ´ k Ferenc va´logatott munkaí, ed. Z. Ferenczi (Bp., n.d.), 169–96, at 177. German version of this speech in Verfassungsstreit, ed. Aegidi and Klauhold, 103–16. 108 For this paragraph, see also above, p. 237; cf. Redlich, Staats- und Reichsproblem, ii. 361 ff. passim.

290


The stage was set for denouement. Francis Joseph, having again forsaken liberal ground at home, was led away from the Confederation, for the last time, into the labyrinth of the Schleswig-Holstein affair, still trusting in monarchical solidarity against revolution, ‘the surest defensive weapon of the existing legal order against the great political and social dangers of our time’:109 still the programme of 1849. Bismarck, of course, double-crossed him; that Bismarck whom, as a strong man in Prussia, he so much admired. The resultant war destroyed German dualism, along with Grossdeutschland as a practical political goal for a long time to come. Grosso¨sterreich was also done for, and with it any lingering hegemony of feudals and clericals. A bargain with the Hungarians, favoured by the moderate wing of liberals in Austria, who escaped at last from their obsession with centralism and civilization, was brokered by the Protestant immigrant, Beust.110 The old internal dualism came back with a vengeance, including two separate citizenships (no more Reichsbu¨rgerrecht), legal systems, legislatures, and so on. Austria—now in many ways the less coherent party to it, as Hungary had been before 1848—did not even survive as a name, formally speaking.111 ‘Compromise’, the time-honoured English term for the legislative transaction of 1867, while not a strictly accurate rendering of Ausgleich or kiegyeze´s, nevertheless conveys a psychological truth. The Austrian experiment was over. But the search for the Monarchy’s greatness was not. Only its context now shifted, with the rehabilitation of Hungary. ‘In the Orient lies our future’, Francis Joseph had written to his mother at the time of the Crimean War, words echoed in public by Stein: ‘Now it is [the Austrian] mission to be the bearer of civilization to lands newly won for Europe.’112 Yet not until the end of the 1860s did the Emperor and his government act consistently to realize this maxim. Within a decade they were embroiled with Bosnia, that medieval dependency of the crown of St Stephen which furnished the first opportunity for dualist aggrandizement.113 Francis Joseph to William I of Prussia, 1864: Srbik, Deutsche Einheit, iv. 210. E´va Somogyi, A birodalmi centralizaćio´to´l. Cf. above, pp. 261 f. Resentment at Beust’s intervention was nevertheless widespread in Austria, and not only on the political right: cf. Briefwechsel Gru¨n–Frankl, ed. Frankl-Hochwart, 314; Beer, Finanzen, 346 ff.; Friedjung, Ausgleich. 111 The ‘Austro-Hungarian Monarchy’ after 1867 consisted of, on the one side, Hungary, and, on the other, ‘the kingdoms and lands [still, after the reconstitution of a separate all-Hungarian parliament] represented in the Reichsrat’: cf. above, p. 246 and passim. For the fate of the ‘Austrian idea’ in this period, cf. Gerald Stourzh in Innere Staatsbildung und gesellschaftliche Modernisierung in ¨ sterreich und Deutschland, 1867/71 bis 1914, ed. H. Rumpler (V./Mun., 1991), 53–68. Note also O that dualism as ‘dual centralism’ was not definitively installed in Austria until 1871, with the failure of the Bohemian constitutional negotiations, and remained incomplete there: cf. above, pp. 207 f. As an interpreter of the circumstances and consequences of the Compromise, Eisenmann, Compromis austro-hongrois, 403–680, has never been surpassed. 112 Brandt, in Die Kaiser der Neuzeit, ed. Schindling and Ziegler, 358; Fritz Fellner, in O ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage, ed. Lutz and Rumpler, 37. 113 For the background: Adolf Beer, Die orientalische Politik Oesterreichs seit 1774 (Pr., 1883). For the Hungarian dimension: La´szlo´ Bencze, Bosznia és Hercegovina okkupaćio´ja 1878-ban (Bp., 1987). A century earlier Dalmatia and Galicia had already been claimed for the Monarchy on the same footing: cf. above, p. 27. 109 110


291

It also proved the maelstrom into which a compromised Habsburg realm would at length be sucked for good and all.

The Austrian experiment was not defeated by general social backwardness, or by economic breakdown; or even, perhaps, by much dissent about methods: its opponents, too, often saw administration, not representation, as the key to success. ‘That the welfare and freedom of a people lie far more in Verwaltung than in Verfassung is a truth still far too little perceived.’114 It failed rather through overextension, through neglect of potential allies, and through bad timing, particularly in respect of constitutional or national ‘concessions’. Underlying that was its internal disharmony, including progressive demoralization of the functionaries who bore the main burden of this ‘dictatorship of the secretariat’, and the restraints on public activity even by those relatively sympathetic to the regime. Deeper still lay the dilemmas of official identity, and the crippled immobility of a system actuated only from above, by an Emperor who rapidly became the first prisoner of the state. He would, said his adjutant and confidant Gru¨nne, admiringly, have made an excellent minister of police: the comment speaks volumes for both of them, and for their management of affairs.115 The young Francis Joseph arguably wielded more complete authority over a more complex range of territories than any other crowned head in modern European history. There is no gainsaying that much of the legacy of that absolutism has been construed in negative terms. Paternalism and etatism; the alienation of society from a powerful administrative machine which ground ever more finely; an unaccountable but incompetent military force: all of this constitutes a black legend, above all in Hungary, and obscures genuine indebtedness. What if reformist measures had been implemented in a ‘neo-Austria’ earlier, before the expectations aroused by 1848, before the added burdens of war debt and rampant army expenditure, before international isolation and mid-century German nationalism? In the event, the 1850s and their aftermath stand exactly halfway between the 1780s and 1914–18, the intermediate lurch towards an overtly German orientation in East-Central Europe, which yielded countervailing tensions elsewhere. Was, then, the century of German domination over the continent being ushered in anyhow, as Namier believed, whether the 114 Egbert Belcredi in May 1850: Z denı ´ku˚ moravske´ho politika, ed. Bocˇek, 18. Note the important, though rather anachronistic, general argument of Sto¨lzl, A¨ra Bach, that it was the absence of a social policy, not nationalism as such, which undermined the Austrian position in Bohemia in the 1850s. Somewhat similar points are made by Mirjana Gross, Pocˇeci moderne Hrvatske: neoapsolutizam u civilnoj Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji, 1850–1860 (Zagreb, 1985), also available in German as Die Anfa¨nge des modernen Kroatien (V., 1993), the largest study of the impact of neo-absolutist dynamism on an undeveloped peripheral region of the Monarchy. 115 This well-known remark is cited by most chroniclers of the period, e.g. by Srbik, Deutsche Einheit, ii. 147.

292


Habsburg realms functioned as official, or just as unofficial, conduit?116 Plus ¸ca change, it may be recalled, is a phrase coined in the turmoils of the midnineteenth century.117 Yet the Austrian experiment was a serious initiative, capable of creative modification and development, if only its creators could have achieved a harmonious perception of their own aims and a realistic assessment of their limitations. We may draw the lesson that ‘Austria’, in the conventional loose sense, was better off if she did not strive after any more precisely ‘Austrian’ raison d’eˆtre, and that efforts to achieve this involved a kind of psychological selfdestruction. It is no accident, perhaps, that the son of Prague’s chief of police, Sacher-Masoch, was at the very same time, during the 1850s, gathering material for his novels of self-abasement, the original documents of ‘masochism’.118 116 The Habsburg Monarchy was ‘the greatest Germanizing agency without a vestige of a German national idea . . . the greatest single obstacle to Germany’s national consolidation, the incarnation and bulwark of principles opposed to it, and yet the greatest asset of an expansionist German imperialism. It had to be removed as an obstacle from within Germany before her unification could be achieved; and then it staked out the line for the initial stages of a German national bid for dominion’: L. B. Namier, draft text of Waynflete Lectures, 1946–7, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. Hist. d. 341–2, here at 341, fos. 2–3. These formed a sequel to Namier’s lecture on 1848, but unfortunately only a few pages of continuous text survive, along with masses of notes (also ibid., MS Eng. Hist. f. 22–3) for a prosopography of the members of the Frankfurt and Vienna/Kremsier parliaments in 1848–9; cf. Namier, Lewis Namier, 266 ff. 117 It is attributed to a satirical pamphlet of Alphonse Karr, Les Gue ˆpes, in January 1849. 118 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, 1836–95, born in Lemberg, was brought up there and, after the revolution, in Prague and Graz, where he became the first lecturer in History at the University under Thun’s new dispensations. Cf. Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, s.v., who calls him a ‘schauerliche Mißgeburt des Geistes der Zeit’, but gives him full treatment; and Bernard Michel, Sacher-Masoch (Paris, 1989).

16 Central Europe: The History of An Idea Concluding reflections on semantics and their implications. Like most of our current ‘Europe’ vocabulary, ‘Central Europe’ (not to say its clone, ‘East-Central Europe’) has no ancient history as a term. The region so described in this book long seemed to need no common denominator. That was partly because of chronic incertitude about its bounds (cf. ch. 7 above); partly because of the lack of any perceived unifying characteristics; but mostly because it contained geopolitical entities sufficient in themselves, above all the Holy Roman Empire with its still universal claims. By the beginning of the nineteenth century that had begun to change, but full identification of a need for ‘Central Europe’ coincided with the final exclusion of ‘Austria’ from ‘Germany’. In the minds of its proponents it became the vehicle for plans to coordinate or even assimilate the Habsburg lands and the Second Reich, above all in the famous Mitteleuropa of Friedrich Naumann. Discredited as such by 1918, ‘Mitteleuropa’ survived as a notion with a more or less German-national tinge—in interplay with other potentially expansionist locutions in the Nazi vocabulary; whereas ‘Central Europe’ tended to be an expression of anti-German solidarity in the usage of the successor states to the Habsburgs, yielding much ground to ‘East Europe’ under Soviet hegemony post-1945. Only with the events of the 1980s has Central Europe gained new life in some quarters as a political ideal. Its cultural associations have likewise revived, with the vogue for that progressive and creative milieu of the fin de sie`cle and for locating the origins of modernism in Vienna and other cities of the region. Whether or not ‘Central Europeans’ in a meaningful sense have ever existed— perhaps the Jews in their apogee c.1900 came closest to adopting it as an identity—the (perceived) common features of the area have a real history, alongside all the sharp divergences within it. Some of them have constituted the themes of the present set of essays.

‘Central Europe(an)’ has been a locution freely employed in the preceding texts. Yet I must admit: the phrase would have been almost wholly unfamiliar to contemporaries. That, of course, does not invalidate it as a term of convenience, provided we recognize the luxuriant variegation in its usage. ‘Central Europe’ is a vague expression, rarely connoting any kind of concrete institution; and even then hardly conducive to establishing common terms of reference. The phrase Unpublished, although some of the material which follows appeared in my sketch of ‘Central Europe, Past and Present’, Central Europe, 1 (2003), 163–7. First drafted in 2000 for a conference at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

294


has never done any real constitutional work. Contrast Central America, whose ‘Republic of United Provinces’, established in 1823 on the collapse of the old Spanish viceroyalty of Nicaragua, survived till 1840, when it was split into five countries—but with no less than twenty-five attempts to revive it in the nineteenth century. Central Asia and Central Africa have likewise, at certain junctures, possessed a more or less distinct political significance. So even has Central Australia, albeit it existed as a province for a mere four years, 1927–31. The semantic history of ‘Central Europe(an)’ did, however, begin to take off, precisely at the end of the period here under consideration. We might wonder why that was so; and I shall hope to show how the phrase’s subsequent career can cast light on issues I have been discussing. For half a century from the 1860s the term gained in currency, though largely still in the German linguistic sphere. Then the peak of its influence can be identified, even dated with remarkable precision. In November 1915 there appeared a volume bearing the simple title Mitteleuropa, by Friedrich Naumann, which within a few months sold 100,000 copies in Germany alone, and gave rise to a continent-wide debate.1 It is ironical that Naumann—Lutheran pastor, economic and social thinker, friend of Weber and Troeltsch—had actually written what remains one of the most incisive, scrupulous, forward-looking, shrewd, and affectionate of all works on the region. Yet in the circumstances of ever more total war, his work was bound in at least equal measure to undermine the credentials of the notion which it sought to promote. In what follows I shall return to Naumann and the consequences of his extraordinary book. But first we must examine the preconditions for this sudden strange prise de conscience about Central Europe. In so doing we must not only, as essential considerations for any such inquiry into the history of concepts or Begriffsgeschichte, guard against back-projection praeter necessitatem. We must also keep in mind that for a given expression to enter the vocabulary of contemporaries, first the elements comprising it—in this case ‘central’ and ‘Europe’—must be available to them, and able to bear a distinct meaning when juxtaposed; and secondly it must be needed, since no alternatives are more adequate to describe the same phenomenon.

‘Europe’ is currently a much debated entity. Yet histories of Europe, even of the European idea, are much more plentiful than analyses of how the term ‘Europe’ was really applied in earlier eras. It certainly seems to have been rare in the Middle Ages, and then usually invoked vis-a`-vis Moslem or Turkish alterities (a circumstance akin, mutatis mutandis, to that in which the Greeks had first 1 Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1915); critical edn. in Naumann, Werke, vol. iv, ed. T. Nipperdey and W. Schieder (Cologne, 1994), 485–766. Eng. trans.: Central Europe, trans. by C. M. Meredith (L., 1916). Latest appraisal: R. vom Bruch (ed.), Friedrich Naumann in seiner Zeit (Berlin, 2000).

Central Europe

295

coined the word). This proto-sense was thus normally supplied by Christianity, and the term stood as a near-synonym for the collectivity of Christendom, until the Renaissance period. Then ‘Europe’ gradually took off; and we should note two main contexts for such reference to the continent as a whole (whatever its precise bounds might be). The one was political: a set of relationships brought into being by the emergence of modern state sovereignty from under the shadow of the imperial tradition and the ideal or threat of monarchia universalis. A Europe-wide balance of ‘great powers’ came to be invoked versus Habsburgs and then especially Bourbons by about 1700—a theme already introduced at the very beginning of this book, and a kind of anticipation of the geopolitical theories spawned by our subject two centuries later, as we shall see below. The other context was cultural: an association of Europe with the Respublica litteraria of humanism, a usage particularly popular, I suspect, among those on the periphery of the continent, who could thereby connect themselves organically with the main classical tradition. That furnished scope, given the full but curtailed participation of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, and to some extent Germany as a whole in the Renaissance, and the strong emulative component within the latter, for representatives of the area featured in this book to stress their equal membership in the Latinate and Roman club (though others too, for example in Celtic lands, were engaged in much the same campaign).2 ‘Central’ is not a straightforward notion either. The word enjoyed some obvious positive connotations: as with the word ‘Mediterranean’ (‘middle land’) in most European languages apart from English. It is a moot point how far it may have benefited from the very different implications of centrality in Ptolemaic and then Copernican conceptions of the universe. At all events, we may recall that medieval Europe (as on the mappae mundi) had its ‘centre’ externally, at Jerusalem. We encounter a similar problem with later cartographical depictions: did the continent have a ‘heart’ in the middle of its international body (and Bohemia appears as such in the famous symbolic image mentioned at the start of Chapter 5 above)—or was there rather a stomach? Other analogous notions were slow to take off: thus there appears to have been only occasional usage in English contexts of the term ‘Midlands’ before the railway age. Anyway, the idea of a centre of Europe awaited definition of the continent’s cardinal points. ‘West’ was present from very early: the ‘Occident’ as a synonym for Christianity (and yielding the enduring overtones of Abendland, as late as Spengler’s misanthropic and reactionary counterblast—so to speak—to Naumann). But that was a definition over against the non-European East. As such the West constituted a zone gradually contracting in space, as the historic pole of antithesis with the Orient was taken over by the concept of ‘Europe’ as a whole—but 2 For this, and the foregoing argument in general, see R. J. W. Evans, ‘Europa als Peripherie in der Fru¨hen Neuzeit’, Jahrbuch f u¨r Europaïsche Geschichte, 3 (2002), 59–79.

296


acquiring new attributes in the process, especially an association with colonies, economic advance, strong monarchy, and early patriotism. Besides, the rise of the vocabulary of ‘Europe’—which we have already noted as datable to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—coincided with the shift to a north–south conceptual division of the continent, which left little scope for centralist notions anyhow, the more so as in such a perspective the Alps were always apt to divide the continent sharply into two with very little remainder. This perspective of North versus South was associated with the same Renaissance debates, moving out from their Mediterranean base; with the Reformation split between Catholic and Protestant; with the emergence of the Baltic in international relations. Recall the traditional management of English foreign affairs by two departments, Northern and Southern. Only from the eighteenth century, with Britain joining France and especially Russia as (increasingly dominant) members of the European balance of power, did a new axis of differentiation become available. Now an ‘East’ was required: a foil to the West which yet in some sense belonged to Europe. That meant primarily Russia and the lands which adjoined it, and Larry Wolff has argued with some plausibility that such a perception emerged among the thinkers of the Enlightenment. The proposition can stand for our purposes here, even though he may have exaggerated the currency of the term at that time, and also the extent of its ‘fabrication’ in the West, as well as the actual geographical range of ‘easternness’ as then conceived.3 After all, ‘northernness’ and ‘southernness’ persisted as organizing ideas from Montesquieu through Schlo¨zer to Ranke and beyond.

Who needed Central Europe anyway? The main political element there at the commencement of the modern period was the Holy Roman Empire: a waning authority, but one which could still make universal claims, as it remained the only formal European empire. Even if the epithet ‘German’ more and more often attached to it, recent attempts to construe the later Reich as essentially a national state avant la lettre seem to mistake that heritage, as they underplay the range of localist, federalist, and cosmopolitan loyalties which continued to hold it together through the eighteenth century.4 At all events, the vocabulary of empire and its ‘patriotism’ stayed powerful enough to trump any mere geographical qualifiers for the region of which it comprised such a large part. Around 1800 the Reich fell apart, ostensibly under Napoleon’s assault, but more fundamentally under the accumulated weight of its own domestic power-political tensions, especially the dualism between Austria and Prussia. 3 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994); cf. my comments in International History Review, 17 (1995), 785 f. Robin Okey, ‘Central Europe/Eastern Europe: Behind the Definitions’, Past & Present, 137 (1992), 102–33 at 110 f. 4 Georg Schmidt, Geschichte des Alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der fru ¨ hen Neuzeit, 1495–1806 (Mun., 1999); cf. above, pp. 9–11.

Central Europe

297

It was replaced in 1815 by a Confederation which largely marched with the borders of the old Reich. This Bund remained in good measure a façade, its two leading members having—together with Russia—incorporated or subordinated the rest of the region within or outwith those borders. Now imperial institutions and traditions were either transmuted (particularly by the Habsburgs) or forsworn (particularly by the Hohenzollerns). In their place stood two state apparatuses which became increasingly embracing and self-sufficient. Metternich has subsequently sometimes been claimed as the first ‘Central European’; but he was surely a squarely ‘Austrian’ statesman.5 Of course, the two leviathans had a good deal in common. Occasionally they cooperated at governmental level, as in 1792–5 and 1813–15; or through various oppositional channels, as in 1848–9, when both hosted early manifestations of both pan-German and pan-Slav activity. Yet such occasions were rare; and it was precisely attempts to embrace the actual or—more often—the desired common features and interests of these two states that led to the first talk of Mitteleuropa in the mid-nineteenth century. The first explicit adumbrations of such a CentralEuropean platform were mainly economic. Not so much the reality of the Zollverein, which fleshed out the institutions of the Bund, as the plans of Friedrich List and Karl Ludwig Bruck: the one more grossdeutsch, the other more grosso¨sterreichisch in orientation; but alike seeking the benefits of free trade across the region, with strong overtones of nationalism and expansionism—probably not just economic—into the Balkans and other neighbouring territory.6 The war of 1866 then consummated the great breach. Or did it? Bismarck’s achievement left the area for the first time without a single name applicable to the bulk of it: the title of German Reich was now appropriated by a polity under the sway of Prussia alone, just as Austria, ironically, ceased formally to be a Reich at all. Yet Bismarck’s subsequent conciliation of the Habsburg realms provided for some kind of single purpose within the Dual Alliance concluded in 1879.7 And that purpose, in an age of jingoism, proved an overwhelmingly German purpose. So it now became crucial that the German people were so finely balanced—as if by a playful providence—across the new frontier: enough of them within Germany to overshadow the entire area; too few of them in Austria to exercise regional hegemony over her; but too many there for Germans as a whole, within and beyond the Monarchy, to accept subordinate or even equal status with its other ethnic groups. What, we might ask ourselves, if Joseph II’s and Kaunitz’s long-nurtured plans to acquire Bavaria had borne fruit? As late as 1872 the great Viennese historian Arneth stressed what benefits this could have brought for both Austria and Germany.8 5 Contrast: Jacques Droz, L’Europe centrale: ´ evolution historique de l’ideé de ‘Mitteleuropa’ (Paris, 6 Ibid., 53 ff., 77 ff. 1960), 21 ff. 7 Bismarck’s ‘Central-European’ agenda is much stressed by Hayes, Bismarck and Mitteleuropa, a strong antidote to kleindeutsch assumptions about him. 8 Cf. above, p. 94. A. von Arneth (ed.), Joseph II. und Leopold von Toscana: Ihr Briefwechsel von 1781 bis 1790 (V., 1872), xxv–xxx.

298


Hence we encounter during those decades a trickle of more or less openly Central-European projects, designed to synchronize the interests of the two powers. There were plans for mitteleuropaïsch political constellations: the notions of federalists like Albert Scha¨ffle or of the more outre´ Constantin Frantz; Paul Lagarde’s atavistic ideas for the recreation of a single great Reich, now under Prussian dominance.9 More tangibly there were economic ventures such as the association established in 1904 under the name of ‘Mitteleuropaïscher Wirtschaftsverein’. These backed joint Austrian and German investment in the Balkans, including a forward policy towards Turkey and propagation of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway.10 Yet the impact of these schemers remained quite limited. There was little general inclination to disturb the intricate constitutional relations in the new German Reich, and such figures as Frantz and Lagarde were largely dismissed at the time as wild and eccentric; whereas projectors in Austria-Hungary—even radical Socialist ones—usually looked to reform under Habsburg aegis alone, with only a fringe of pan-Germans, who sought to destroy the Monarchy precisely in order to join the Reich, acting as the exception to prove the rule.11 Besides, the main thrust of German economic expansion was increasingly towards Weltpolitik and colonialism, a more important arena than investment in south-east Europe, where it tended to conflict with Austro-Hungarian ambitions anyway, reinforcing protectionist tendencies among the industrial leaders of the latter—and the jitters of its diplomats.

Often overlooked, but perhaps more important for their time than manifestations of Central-European enthusiasm in either the political or economic spheres were geographical ideas, especially those of Joseph Partsch, a pioneer of his subject born (revealingly) near the Prussian–Bohemian frontier, just on the German side of the Riesengebirge. He was not quite the first to use the term: Eliseé Reclus (equally famous as an anarchist) had entitled a volume of his Nouvelle geógraphie universelle ‘l’Europe centrale’ as early as the 1870s. But Partsch’s Central Europe actually first appeared in English in 1903, in a notable series edited by Halford Mackinder, founder of the Geography department at Oxford and later director of the London School of Economics. Even if the latter did his job rather too thoroughly in this case—as Partsch observed with some asperity when presenting the fuller version of his work in German the 9 Droz, L’Europe centrale, 101 ff. For Frantz and Mitteleuropa, see Roman Schnur in Der Staat, 25 (1986), 545 ff.; W. R. Weitzmann in Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects, ed. P. Stirk (Edinburgh, 1994), 36–60. 10 Important study by Jerzy Chodorowski, Niemiecka doktrina gospodarki wielkiego obszaru, 1800–1945 (Wrocław, 1972). 11 That is the conclusion of the pioneering and still impressive work of Henry C. Meyer, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955). But cf. Droz, L’Europe centrale, 153–205, who takes a different view of these Austrian projectors.

Central Europe

299

following year—it is clear that no wedge could, at that stage anyhow, be driven between ‘Mitteleuropa’ and ‘Central Europe’. As a correspondent reported to Partsch: ‘Your book on Central Europe has made your name common in all geographical circles in America.’12 With this, the notion of Central Europe, envisaged by most of its proponents as (in Partsch’s words) ‘a region (Erdraum) which has blossomed under the tutelage of German culture’, became part of the armoury of political geography—a discipline largely founded by Mackinder and by Friedrich Ratzel, one of the leaders of the Pan-German League, whom Partsch succeeded at Leipzig in that same year 1904.13 Within another decade it grew better known, and gained greater ideological clout, as ‘geopolitics’. The last chapter of Partsch’s book, ‘The Geographical Conditions of National Defence (Landesverteidigung)’, which had examined the prospects for protecting the region from French or Russian assault, now came into play with a vengeance. Soon he was giving strategic advice to Ludendorff. That is where Friedrich Naumann re-enters our story. He employed the same spacial conception as Partsch (and it is surely no coincidence that Naumann too had lived for years up against the Bohemian border, in the Saxon Erzgebirge)— the more so when his work was expanded in 1916 to include the Balkans, after his encouraging visit to Germany’s Bulgarian ally.14 To account for the runaway success of his book, we should bear in mind how war had reoriented attitudes in two other spheres as well. On the one hand, it gave the opportunity for radical constitutional thinking, as Naumann makes quite explicit at the outset of his text. On the other, the blockade suddenly concentrated German minds steeped in Weltpolitik on the need to command an economic hinterland within Europe. Hence the great ‘Mitteleuropa’ debate in Germany and Austria from 1915 to 1918. Naumann’s generous vision was of a German–Austro-Hungarian confederation (an Oberstaat) and free-trade area, open to smaller neighbours, powered by the multifarious vitality and complementarity of its regional and national diverseness. His vision gained widespread currency, and called forth a flood of responses from both proponents and detractors (there were significant numbers of German Austrians among the latter).15 But the issue was soon 12 Partsch, Mitteleuropa: Die La ¨ nder und Vo¨lker von den Westalpen und dem Balkan bis an den Kanal und das Kurische Haff (Gotha, 1904); cf. id., Aus fu¨nfzig Jahren: Verlorene Schriften, ed. H. Waldbaur (Breslau, 1927), quoted at 14 f. For the survival of his ideas, cf. E. Heyn and E. Schmitt (ed.), Mitteleuropa im Geographieunterricht (Brunswick, 1964), 56, 66, 80, 85, and passim. 13 Ratzel, Politische Geographie, ed. E. Oberhummer (3rd edn., Mun./Berlin, 1923), with evaluation of Ratzel; cf. Gu¨nther Buttmann, Friedrich Ratzel: Leben und Werk eines deutschen 14 Naumann, Bulgarien und Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1916). Geographen (Stuttgart, 1977). 15 Debate: Meyer, Mitteleuropa; Droz, L’Europe centrale, 207 ff.; Janusz Pajewski, ‘Mitteleuropa’: studia z dziejo´w imperializmu niemieckiego w dobie pierwszej wojny ´swiatowej (Poznan´, 1959), ¨ sterrei112–37. In Austria, esp: Gu¨nther Ramhardter, Geschichtswissenschaft und Patriotismus: O chische Historiker im Weltkrieg, 1914–18 (Mun., 1973); Zdeneˇk Jindra, in Studie k modernı´m deˇjina´m. Sbornı´k pracı´ k 70. narozenina´m Vlastislava Laciny, ed. J. Harna and P. Proksˇ (Pr., 2001), 137–54.

300


subsumed in larger controversy about the expansionism of the Central (sic) Powers. And whereas a reasonably moderate observer like the noted historian Hermann Oncken could appreciate Naumann’s ‘warm-hearted and versatile intellect’ and look to ‘a free politico-economico-cultural community of interest between larger and smaller peoples’—not a deutsches Herrenreich ‘after the English model’—he insisted on asserting Germany’s rightful authority throughout the region.16 Many of Oncken’s countrymen were ready to ride roughshod over the interests and sensibilities of the rest of the area. Such objectives suffered correspondingly dramatic burial in the 1918 collapse of both parties to the Dual Alliance. Mitteleuropa seemed to have been a heady brew, but a product with a very short shelf-life. Naumann himself abandoned it, and in the little time which remained to him turned his talents towards devising a constitution for the Weimar Republic. But the programme was soon resurrected in more squarely nationalist forms in both truncated Germany and rump Austria. Mitteleuropa now became rapidly appropriated to Nazi purposes, although it seems on the whole to have been a subordinate category in Ostpolitik and the associated quasi-academic Ostforschung. This set up its main stagingposts towards the Baltic and the Polish lands, as already adumbrated by (say) Oncken, as part of the national-conservative ideology.17 Nor were all its more radical manifestations aligned with Nazism from the outset: for instance the group around the journal Die Tat, who extended their coverage to the whole of the new ‘Zwischeneuropa’, a term coined by Giselher Wirsing for what the West called the ‘succession’ (later ‘successor’) states. Wirsing’s book of 1932 on the subject began with a rousing declaration about Germany’s ‘spatial destiny to be the centre and heart of Europe’; but his thinking was hegemonic rather than racial.18 Hitler himself, having demanded Anschluss with Austria on page one of Mein Kampf, displays extreme contempt later in the book for the traditions of his native land, and quite fails to develop explicit mitteleuropaïsch ideas. Evidently his and his followers’ vo¨lkisch concentration on populations (Gesamtdeutschtum) and on hazy territorial rhetoric (Lebensraum), rather than on definite regions, contributed to this. For all that, Central Europe did have its place in Nazi doctrine and strategy.19 It clearly left its impact on Hitler, that characteristic Mitteleuropa ‘borderer’, and on his policy decisions especially of 1938 (and also Oncken, Das alte und das neue Mitteleuropa (Gotha, 1917), 95 ff., 109 ff. Ibid. 119 ff. In general, cf. Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Camb., 1988). 18 ‘Das deutsche Raumschicksal, Europas Mitte und Herz zu sein, ist der Angelpunkt der politischen Existenz unseres Volkes’: Wirsing, Zwischeuropa und die deutsche Zukunft (Jena, 1932). Cf. Hans Hecker, Die Tat und ihr Osteuropa-Bild, 1909–39 (Cologne, 1974); Okey, ‘Central Europe/Eastern Europe’, 120 ff.. 19 See now Ju ¨ rgen Elvert, Mitteleuropa! Deutsche Pla¨ne zur europaïschen Neuordnung, 1918–45 (Stuttgart, 1999). This aspect, which belonged rather to contemporary Su¨dostforschung than Ostforschung, is correspondingly neglected in Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards (n. 17 above). 16 17

Central Europe

301

1941). It was implied in the whole programme of Grossraumwirtschaft, even while making little direct appeal to the Naumann model. And it received its most prominent and sophisticated intellectual rationale from the historian Heinrich von Srbik, President of the Austrian Academy of Sciences under the National Socialist regime, who placed Mitteleuropa at the core of his account of the maturation of the ideal of ‘German unity’.20 All of which was meanwhile sufficient finally to render the notion, in this form and perhaps any form, anathema to non-Germans of the whole region.

They had had little to do with ‘Central Europe’ earlier either. Some Hungarians came closest to finding the prospect attractive. Already before 1914 there were certain economic soundings; and then Naumann’s mirage gained a degree of response from industrialists and other public figures. Rejected by the wartime political establishment, from Tisza to Ka´rolyi, it could appeal to intellectual reformers like Oszka´r Ja´szi and even the socialist Ervin Szabo´.21 Mitteleuropa played there into the tradition of (con)federal plans, since La´szlo´ Teleki’s and Lajos Kossuth’s after 1848. These, as their regular ‘Danubian’ epithets hinted, always tended to be Hungarocentric (even when they were not Magyarocentric), hence no more acceptable to most of their neighbours than the German version. Nowhere was ‘Ko¨ze´p-Euro´pa’ (and often ‘Central Europe’ eo nomine for greater publicity) more invoked among the successor states than in Budapest; as with the engineer and geographer Albert Hala´sz and the economist and financier Eleme´r Hantos.22 Their advocacy proved largely abortive, though it chimed with some foreign views, for example with the usage of the British Foreign Office, which continued to subsume most of the region in its Central department (whereas Poland was still assigned to the North, and the Balkans also remained separate)— and not without a sense that the old regime had been better than the new.23 The Slavs of the area were deeply mistrustful. Nothing in their political culture fitted with Central European schemes, except some of the wilder panSlav ideas bandied since the days of Kolla´r and Sˇafa´rı´k; and even these had almost always been at most Austro-Slav in conception.24 In 1918, in the USA, 20 Srbik, Deutsche Einheit; the argument summarized in his Mitteleuropa: Das Problem und die Versuche seiner Lo¨sung in der deutschen Geschichte (Weimar, 1937). On him, see Heinrich Ritter von Srbik: Die wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz des Historikers, 1912–45, ed. J. Ka¨mmerer (Boppard a.R., 1988). A dispassionate view of Großraumwirtschaft in Chodorowski, Niemiecka doktrina gospodarki. 21 Ka ´roly Irinyi, Mitteleuropa-tervek és az osztra´k-magyar politikai ko¨zgondolkoda´s (Bp., 1973), 161–263. 22 e.g. Hala ´sz (comp.), Das neue Mitteleuropa in wirtschaftlichen Karten: New Central Europe in Economical [sic] Maps (Berlin, 1928). Hantos, L’Europe centrale: une nouvelle organisation économique (Paris, 1932), etc. Cf. Droz, L’Europe centrale, 243 ff.; Chodorowski, Niemiecka doktrina gospodarki, 191 ff.; Peter Stirk in Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects, ed. Stirk, 86–111. 23 Ga ´bor Ba´tonyi, Britain and Central Europe, 1918–33 (Ox., 1999). 24 On which see Alfred Fischel, Der Panslawismus bis zum Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1919); Moritsch, Austroslavismus. Wartime contacts: Jirˇ´ı Korˇalka in Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. R. G. Plaschka (V., 1995), 25–37.

302


Toma´ˇs Masaryk found himself promoted to the chair of a ‘Mid-European Democratic Union’, which included emigre´ representatives of eleven nations (until the Poles dropped out) from the Baltic to Greece, sent a delegation to meet President Wilson, and held a congress at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, in October, just as the Monarchy was beginning to fall apart. Masaryk viewed it as an earnest of a different kind of Central-European cooperation (like the future Little Entente); but he was clearly not at ease with the term as anything other than a vague geographical expression, and rarely made use of it. Indeed, he and Seton-Watson established the rhetoric of a ‘New Europe’ (the title of their journal founded in London during the war) precisely to counteract the perverse influence of Mitteleuropa, as they saw it.25 There was a correspondingly low premium during the inter-war years for ‘Strˇednı´ Evropa’, despite some Czech propagation of the idea abroad, as in the titles of journals like Central European Observer and L’Europe Centrale from the 1920s. By the mid-thirties the added urgency for collaboration between successor states gave rise to more concrete proposals for some kind of overarching political constellation, particularly the initiatives by Milan Hodzˇa. Benesˇ now espoused the locution, and carried it with him into exile after 1938, as with his programmatic statement in the first issue of a new Journal of Central European Affairs, launched in America in 1941.26 During the second World War the Poles also began to display a degree of interest in the concept which appears to have been absent earlier, at all events since the grandiose confederal plans of the Hoˆtel Lambert group between the first and second insurrections. The whole place of Poland in ‘Central Europe’ had anyway long been unclear: it was bracketed out by Partsch and initially by Naumann too; then the Poles themselves had speedily been alienated from the whole notion by German policy in 1914–18. Now, momentarily, they reviewed the prospects for a ‘Central European Confederation’ with the Czechs.27 After 1945, when Benesˇ’s as well as Hitler’s vision for the region joined the Habsburg Monarchy in the dustbin of history, a semantic void opened up, at 25 Masaryk, Die Weltrevolution: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen 1914–18 (Berlin, 1925), 268 f., 382, 438 f. Id., Nova´ Evropa (Pr., 1920), trans. as Das neue Europa (Berlin, 1922), passim. T. Syllaba (ed.), Masaryk a mysˇlenka evropske´ jednoty (Pr., 1992). Seton-Watson said that the New Europe was ‘our answer to the Pan-German project of Mitteleuropa and Berlin–Baghdad’: quoted in Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects, ed. Stirk, 1–35, at 14. 26 Benes ˇ entitled his piece ‘A New Central Europe’; this Journal, established at the University of Colorado, ceased publication in 1964. Cf. Benesˇ, Towards a Lasting Peace: Three Speeches . . . (n.p. [1942]); Czechoslovakia in Post-War Europe: Problems of Reconstruction (L., 1942), 36–50. For the background: Zbyneˇk Zeman and Antonıń Klı´mek, The Life of Edvard Benesˇ, 1884–1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War (Ox., 1997), 140 ff. 27 For the diplomatic antecedents: Marian Kukiel, Czartoryski and European Unity, 1770–1861 (Princeton, 1955); Hans Henning Hahn, Außenpolitik in der Emigration: die Exildiplomatie Adam Jerzy Czartoryskis 1830–40 (Mun., 1978); Jerzy Skowronek, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, 1770–1861 (Warsaw, 1994). Pajewski, ‘Mitteleuropa’; Tadeusz Kisielewski, Federacja ´srodkowoeuropejska: pertraktacje polsko-czechoslowackie, 1939–43 (Warsaw, 1991); Plaschka, Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen, 305–81.

Central Europe

303

least in respect of the non-German territories which the term ‘Mitteleuropa’ had sought to embrace. Two rivals disputed the succession. One of them was ‘East(ern) Europe’, whose earlier career seems (pace Wolff) to have been modest, but which already began to come into favour in the inter-war years as a description of the whole area including Russia—or else with the Soviet Union withdrawn into a new category of its own. That usage is familiar to us from the 1920s designation of ‘Slavonic and East European Studies’ as the purpose of the prime British institution dedicated to the subject, however that rather self-contradictory appellation was to be understood.28 The other phrase was ‘East-Central Europe’, a new coinage—successor to Zwischeneuropa—originally minted by German commentators seeking critical distance from, and perhaps reconciliation with, their mitteleuropaïsch neighbours.29 Neither formulation proved adequate. ‘East Europe’, a dangerously anachronistic construct sustained by the temporary realities of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, collapsed—at least in informed historical debate—under its own conceptual ballast after 1989. ‘East-Central Europe’ has always sounded ponderous, even precious, to an English ear, besides still begging the question of what was ‘central’ (but presumably not ‘west-central’) about its designated area in the first place. Meanwhile the previous terminology has made a comeback. Not only does Mitteleuropa continue to supply a variety of needs in German-language contexts, where it denotes a region containing, but typically not limited to, the present or former German state.30 But ‘Central Europe’ has been revived and endowed with largely positive associations among influential circles in a swathe of countries from the Baltic to the Adriatic, notably in Poland, where ‘Europa S´rodkowa’ has never enjoyed a better press. Thus ‘Central Europe’, always an aspiration or a bugaboo rather than a hard political reality, nowadays serves several overlapping heuristic functions. It is a loose expression for the territories of the former Habsburg Monarchy, whose demise left an onomastic void in the middle of the continent. It may also embrace neighbouring lands, especially the squarely German ones with which that area always had close associations. It may imply, on the one hand, peculiar features of the region over against others; on the other, internal solidarities, even identities, generated by common historical development. Some stimulating, but inconclusive investigations in this vein have contributed to recent debate.31 The peak of such communalities is now often seen in the decades around 1900, with the making of a purportedly distinctive and certainly innovative high culture, in Cf. Evans, Great Britain and East-Central Europe, 9 and n., for this point. Werner Conze, Ostmitteleuropa, von der Spa¨tantike bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. K. Zernack (Mun., 1992), 1 ff., where the political reality of the area is specifically assigned only to the period since 1800. Cf. also Istvań Fried, Ostmitteleuropaïsche Studien (Szeged, 1994), 1–59. 30 Examples in Evans, ‘Central Europe Past and Present’ (above, p. 293), 166. 31 E.g. Jeno˝ Szu ˝cs, Va´zlat Euro´pa ha´rom to¨rteńeti re´gio´ja´ro´l (Bp., 1983), with Fr. trans., as Les trois Europes, 1985; cf. Jacques Rupnik, The Other Europe (L., 1988), esp. 3–23. 28 29

304


which assimilated Jews played a crucial role.32 Yet those same years also served as the forcing-ground for separatist tendencies which fractured and then pulverized the area during the earlier twentieth century. The essays in this collection have, I hope, helped clarify some of the interactions which had brought Central Europe to that point. 32 Steven Beller, in Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects, ed. Stirk, 61–85, and in Central Europe, 2 (2003), 169–77, for comment on this as a ‘Central-European’ theme.

Select Bibliography Acht Jahre Amtsleben in Ungarn, von einem k. k. Stuhlrichter in Disponibilita¨t, [ed. G. Oehme] (Leipzig, 1861). Aegidi, L. K., and Klauhold, A. (ed.), Der ungarische Verfassungsstreit urkundlich dargestellt (Hamburg, 1862). Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (56 vols., Leipzig, 1875–1912). Ammerer, G., and Haas, H. (ed.), Ambivalenzen der Aufkla¨rung: Festschrift fu¨r Ernst Wangermann (V., 1997). Andics, Erzse'bet, Metternich und die Frage Ungarns (Bp., 1973). Andres, Juan, Carta a su hermano D. Carlos Andres dandole noticia de la literatura di Viena (Madrid, 1794). Aretin, Karl Otmar von, Das Alte Reich, 1648–1806 (4 vols., Stuttgart, 1993–2000). Arneth, Alfred von, Geschichte Maria Theresias (10 vols., V., 1863–79). —— Aus meinem Leben (2 vols., V., 1891–2). Bade, K. J. (ed.), Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in Deutschland: Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Mun., 1992). ¨ sterreichische Monarchie: Von einer Bahlcke, Joachim, Ungarischer Episkopat und O Partnerschaft zur Konfrontation, 1686–1790 (Stuttgart, 2005). —— and Strohmeyer, A. (ed.), Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa: Wirkungen des religio¨sen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1999). Bala'zs, E´va H., Berzeviczy Gergely a reformpolitikus (Bp., 1967). —— Hungary and the Habsburgs, 1765–1800: An Experiment in Enlightened Absolutism (Bp., 1997). Banac, I., et al. (ed.), Nation and Ideology: Essays in Honor of Wayne S. Vucinich (Boulder, Colo., 1981). Barker, Thomas M., Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy: Essays on War, Society, and Government in Austria, 1618–1780 (Boulder, Colo., 1982). Barner, W. (ed.), Tradition, Norm, Innovation: Soziales und literarisches Traditionsverhalten in der Fru¨hzeit der deutschen Aufkla¨rung (Mun., 1989). * * Bartlett, R., and Schonwalder, K. (ed.), The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on the History of their Social, Cultural and Political Relations (L., 1999). Beales, Derek, Joseph II, vol. i: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741–80 (Camb., 1987). —— Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe (L., 2005). Beer, Adolf, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert (Pr., 1877). Bein, Werner, Schlesien in der habsburgischen Politik: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des Dualismus im Alten Reich (Sigmaringen, 1994). Beˇlina, Pavel, et al., Velke´ deˇjiny zemı´ koruny ˇceske´, vol. x: 1740–92 (Pr./Litomysˇl, 2001). Bernard, Paul P., ‘Origins of Josephinism’, Colorado College Studies, 7 (1964). Bernath, Matthias, Habsburg und die Anfa¨nge der ruma¨nischen Nationsbildung (Leiden, 1972).

306

Select Bibliography

Berzeviczy, Albert, Az absolutismus kora Magyarorsza´gon, 1849–65 (4 vols., the last op. posth. and incomplete, Bp., 1922–37). Bibl, Viktor, Die niedero¨sterreichischen Sta¨nde im Vorma¨rz (V., 1911). Bismarck, Otto von, Gedanken und Erinnerungen (2 vols., Stuttgart, 1898). Blanning, T. C. W., The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789 (Ox., 2002). Bled, Jean-Paul, Franz Joseph (Eng. trans., Ox., 1992). Blitz, Hans-Martin, Aus Liebe zum Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2000). Bocˇek, J. (ed.), Z denı´ku˚ moravske´ho politika v éˇre bachoveˇ: Egbert Belcredi, 1850–9 (Brno, 1976). Bodea, Cornelia (ed.), 1848 la romaˆni: o istorie ˆın date ¸s i ma˘rturii (2 vols., Buch., 1982). * Bohme, Helmut, Deutschlands Weg zur Großmacht: Studien zum Verha¨ltnis von Wirtschaft und Staat wa¨hrend der Reichsgru¨ndungszeit, 1848–81 (Cologne/Berlin, 1966). Brandt, Harm-Hinrich, Der o¨sterreichische Neoabsolutismus: Staatsfinanzen und Politik, 1848–60 (2 vols., Go¨ttingen, 1978). Bronevskii, V. B., Puteshestvie ot Triesta do S-Peterburga v 1810 godu (2 vols., Moscow, 1828). * ¨ sterreichs (V., 1985). Bruckmuller, Ernst, Sozialgeschichte O Buchinger, Erich, Die ‘Landler’ in Siebenbu¨rgen (Mun., 1980). Bunnell, Adam, Before Infallibility: Liberal Catholicism in Biedermeier Vienna (L./Toronto, 1990). Carl von Oesterreich, Erzherzog, Ausgewa¨hlte Schriften (7 vols., V./Leipzig, 1893–4). Charmatz, Richard, Adolf Fischhof, das Lebensbild eines o¨sterreichischen Politikers (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1910). Cherestes¸iu, Victor, Adunarea nat¸ionala˘ de la Blaj (Buch., 1966). Chodorowski, Jerzy, Niemiecka doktrina gospodarki wielkiego obszaru, 1800–1945 (Wrocław, 1972). Coxe, William, History of the House of Austria . . . to Which is Added, Genesis, or Details of the Late Austrian Revolution by an Officer of State (4 vols., 2nd edn., repr. L., 1872). Csanak, Do'ra F., Ke´t korszak hata´rań: Teleki Jo´zsef (Bp., 1983). Csizmadia, Andor, A magyar ko¨zigazgata´s fejlo˝de´se a XVIII. sza´zadto´l a tanaćsrendszer le´trejo¨tteíg (Bp., 1976). Czoernig, Carl von, Oesterreichs Neugestaltung, 1848–58 (Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1858). Dann, O., and Dinwiddy, J. (ed.), Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (L., 1988). Dea'k, A´gnes, ‘Nemzeti egyenjogu´sı´ta´s’: kormańyzati nemzetise´gpolitika Magyarorsza´gon, 1849–60 (Bp., 2000). Dea'k, Istva'n, The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–9 (New York, 1979). De'nes, Iva'n Z., ‘The Political Role of Hungary’s Nineteenth-Century Conservatives and How They Saw Themselves’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 845–65. Denis, Arnosˇt [Ernest], Cˇechy po Bı´le´ Horˇe, ed. J. Vancˇura, (3rd edn., 2 vols., Pr., 1921).

Select Bibliography

307

Dickson, P. G. M., Finance and Government under Maria Theresia, 1740–1780 (2 vols., Ox., 1987). Dio'szegi, Istva'n, ‘A Dea´k-pa´rt e´s a ne´met egyse´g’, Sz. 104 (1970), 227–49. —— Bismarck és Andra´ssy: Magyarorsza´g a ne´met hatalmi politika´ban a XIX. sza´zad ma´sodik fele´ben (Bp., 1998). Domanovszky, Sa'ndor, Jo´zsef na´dor élete (2 vols., Bp., 1944). ¨ sterreich unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II. Drabek, A. M., et al. (ed.), Ungarn und O (V., 1982). Droz, Jacques, L’Europe centrale: évolution historique de l’ideé de ‘Mitteleuropa’ (Paris, 1960). * Echternkamp, Jorg, Der Aufstieg des deutschen Nationalismus, 1770–1840 (Frankfurt a.M., 1998), 41 ff. Eisenmann, Louis, Le Compromis austro-hongrois de 1867 (Paris, 1904). Ember, Gy., and Heckenast, G. (ed.), Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete, 1686–1790 (2 vols., Bp., 1989). * * Eotvos, Jo'zsef, Reform és hazafisa´g, ed. I. Fenyo˝ (3 vols., Bp., 1978). —— [anon.] Die Garantien der Macht und Einheit Oesterreichs (Leipzig, 1859). Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation (3rd edn., Ox., 1991). —— ‘Josephinism, ‘‘Austrianness’’, and the Revolution of 1848’, Austrian Studies, 2 (1991). —— ‘Austrian Identity in Hungarian Perspective: The Nineteenth Century’, Austrian Studies, 5 (1994), 27–36. —— ‘Szećhenyi and Austria’, in History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and D. Cannadine (Camb., 1996), 113–41. —— Great Britain and East-Central Europe, 1908–48: A Study in Perceptions (L., 2002). —— ‘Language and State-Building: The Case of the Habsburg Monarchy’, AHY 35 (2004), 1–24. —— and Pogge von Strandmann, H. (ed.), The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–9: From Reform to Reaction (Ox., 2000). Fancev, F. (ed.), Dokumenti za nasˇe podrijetlo hrvatskoga preporoda (Zagreb, 1933). Fa'ndly, Juraj, Vy´ber z diela, ed. J. Tibensky´ (Brat., 1954). Fe'nyes, Elek, Magyarorsza´g statistika´ja (3 vols., Pest, 1842–3). Fleischhauer, Ingeborg, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich: Zwei Jahrhunderte deutschrussische Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1986). Folberth, Otto, Der Prozeß Stephan Ludwig Roth: Ein Kapitel Nationalita¨tengeschichte Su¨dosteuropas im 19. Jahrhundert (Graz/Cologne, 1959). Frankl-Hochwart, B. von (ed.), Briefwechsel zwischen Anastasius Gru¨n und Ludwig August Frankl (Berlin, 1897). Friedjung, Heinrich, Der Ausgleich mit Ungarn (3rd edn., Leipzig, 1878). —— Historische Aufsa¨tze (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1919). —— The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 1859–66, trans. A. J. P. Taylor and W. L. McElwee (L., 1935). Friedmann, O. Bernhard, Zehn Jahre oesterreichische Politik 1859–69, vol. i (V., 1879). Gala'ntai, Jo'zsef, ‘Osztra´k-magyar egyezkede´s, 1865–7’, Sz. 101 (1967), 1265–309.

308

Select Bibliography

Garver, Bruce, The Young Czech Party, 1874–1901, and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System (New Haven, 1978). Gavrilovic', S., and Petrovic', N. (ed.), Temisˇvarski Sabor 1790 (Novi Sad, 1972). Geist-La'nyi, Paula, Das Nationalita¨tenproblem auf dem Reichstag zu Kremsier, 1848–9 (Mun., 1920). Gerencse'r, Istva'n, A magyar felvila´gosoda´s és a kegyes iskola´k (Bp., 1943). Gherardi, Raffaella, Potere e costituzione a Vienna fra Sei e Settecento: il ‘buon ordine’ di Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (Bologna, 1980). Glatz, Jakob (ed.), Az ausztriai tsa´sz. kir. birodalomban 1817-ben tartatott reforma´tzio´ harmadik sza´zados o¨ro¨minnepeńek elo˝ada´sa (V., 1818). Gogola'k, Ludwig [Lajos], Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des slovakischen Volkes, vol. ii: 1790–1848 (Mun., 1969). * Gollner, Carl, Die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen in den Revolutionsjahren, 1848–9 (Buch., 1967). —— (ed.), Geschichte der Deutschen auf dem Gebiete Ruma¨niens, vol. i: 12. Jahrhundert bis 1848 (Buch., 1979). —— (ed.), Die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen in den Jahren 1848–1918 (Cologne, 1988). —— and Stanescu, H. (ed.), Aufkla¨rung: Schrifttum der Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen und Banater Schwaben (Buch., 1974). Goloubeva, Maria, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text (Mainz, 2000). Gonda, Imre, Bismarck és az 1867-es osztra´k-magyar kiegyeze´s (Bp., 1960). Gottas, Friedrich, Die Frage der Protestanten in Ungarn in der A¨ra des Neoabsolutismus (Mun., 1965). Gragger, Robert, Preußen, Weimar und die ungarische Ko¨nigskrone (Berlin/Leipzig, 1923). Gross, Lothar, Die Geschichte der deutschen Reichshofkanzlei von 1559 bis 1806 (V., 1933). ¨ sterreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II. (V., 1980). Gutkas, K, et al. (ed.), O Hajdu, Lajos, II. Jo´zsef igazgata´si reformjai Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1982). Hajnal, Istva'n, A Batthyańy-kormańy ku¨lpolitika´ja (Bp., 1957). Hammerstein, Notker, Aufkla¨rung und katholisches Reich: Untersuchung zur Universita¨tsreform und Politik katholischer Territorien des Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reiches deutscher Nation im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1977). Hanusˇ, Josef, Na´rodnı´ Museum a nasˇe obrozenı´ (2 vols., Pr., 1921–3). Hartig, F. (ed.), Metternich–Hartig: Ein Briefwechsel des Staatskanzlers aus dem Exil, 1848–55 (V./Leipzig, 1923). Hassenpflug-Elzholz, Eila, Bo¨hmen und die bo¨hmischen Sta¨nde in der Zeit des beginnenden Zentralismus (V., 1982). Haubelt, Josef, Studie o Ignaći Bornovi (Pr., 1972). —— Cˇeske´ osvıćenstvı´ (Pr., 1986). Hayes, Bascom B., Bismarck and Mitteleuropa (Rutherford, NJ/L., 1994). Hebbel, Friedrich, Werke, ed. G. Fricke et al. (Mun., 1967). Heckscher, Eli, Mercantilism (2 vols., Eng. trans., L., 1934). Heffter, Heinrich, Die deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19. Jahrhundert: Geschichte der Ideen und Institutionen (Stuttgart, 1950).

Select Bibliography

309

¨ sterreich,1780 bis Heindl, Waltraud, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bu¨rokratie und Beamte in O 1848 (V., 1991). —— (ed.), Die Protokolle des o¨sterreichischen Ministerrates, 1848–67. Abt. III: Das Ministerium Buol-Schauenstein (5 vols., V., 1975–93). Herder, Johann Gottfried, Fru¨he Schriften, 1764–72, ed. U. Gaier (Frankfurt a.M., 1985). ¨ sterreich (V., 1977). Hersche, Peter, Der Spa¨tjansenismus in O Hertslet, E. J. (comp.), The Map of Europe by Treaty . . . since the General Peace of 1814 (4 vols., L., 1875–91). Heydendorff d. J., Michael von, Unter fu¨nf Kaisern. Tagebuch, 1786–1856, ed. O. Folberth and U. W. Acker (Mun., 1978). Higounet, Charles, Die deutsche Ostsiedlung im Mittelalter (Ger. trans., Mun., 1990). Hitchins, Keith, L’Ideé de nation chez les Roumains de Transylvanie, 1691–1849 (Buch., 1987). Hochedlinger, Michael, Austria’s Wars of Emergence, 1683–1797 (L., 2003). Hock, Carl von, and Bidermann, Hermann I., Der o¨sterreichische Staatsrat (V., 1879). Holoti'k, L’. (ed.), L’udovı´t Sˇtu´r und die slawische Wechselseitigkeit (Brat., 1969). Hope, Nicholas M., The Alternative to German Unification. The Anti-Prussian Party: Frankfurt, Nassau, and the Two Hessen, 1859–67 (Wiesbaden, 1973). Hora'nyi, Elek, Scriptores Piarum Scholarum (2 vols., Buda, 1808–9). Horvat, Josip, Kultura Hrvata kroz 1000 godina (2 vols., Zagreb, 1939–42). Horva'th, Miha'ly, Az ipar és kereskede´s to¨rteńete Magyarorsza´gban a ha´rom utolso´ sza´zad alatt (Buda, 1840). —— Huszono¨t év Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme´bo˝l 1823-to´l 1848-ig (2 vols., Geneva, 1864). —— Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńelme, vol. viii (Bp., 1873). Hroch, Miroslav, Die Vorka¨mpfer der nationalen Bewegung bei den kleinen Vo¨lkern Europas: Eine vergleichende Analyse zur gesellschaftlichen Schichtung der patriotischen Gruppen (Pr., 1968). —— Na prahu na´rodnı´ existence: touha a skutecˇnost (Pr., 1999). Huber, Augustinus K., ‘Das Stift Tepl im Aufkla¨rungszeitalter’, Analecta Praemonstratensia, 26 (1950), 41–66; 27 (1951), 28–50; 28 (1952), 16–45; 29 (1953), 67–105; 30 (1954), 41–59. * Hubner, Joseph A. von, La Monarchia Austriaca dopo Villafranca, ed. M. C. Drudi (Rome, 1959). Hucˇko, Ja'n, Socia´lne zlozˇenie a poˆvod slovenskej obrodenskej inteligencie (Brat., 1974). Hudak, Adalbert, and Guzsak, Ladislaus, Karpatendeutsche Lebensbilder (Erlangen, 1971). Ingrao, Charles W., In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1979). —— (ed.), State and Society in Early Modern Austria (W. Lafayette, Ind., 1994). Iorga, Nicolae, Istoria romaˆnilor din Ardeal ¸si Ungaria, ed. G. Penelea (Buch., 1989). Ives, Margaret C., Enlightenment and National Revival: Patterns of Interplay and Paradox in Late 18th-Century Hungary (L., 1979). Ja¨ger, Albert, ‘Das Eindringen des modernen kirchenfeindlichen Zeitgeistes in ¨ sterreich unter Karl VI. und Maria Theresia’, Zeitschrift fu¨r katholische Theologie, O 2 (1878), 259–311, 417–72.

310

Select Bibliography

Jekeli, Hermann, Die Bischo¨fe der ev. Kirche A.B. in Siebenbu¨rgen, vol. i: 1553–1867 (Hermannstadt, 1933; repr. Cologne, 1978). Kaindl, Raimund F., Geschichte der Deutschen in den Karpathenla¨ndern (3 vols., Gotha, 1907–11). Kann, Robert A., The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1848–1918 (2 vols., New York, 1950). Kappeler, A., et al. (eds.), Die Deutschen im Russischen Reich und im Sowjetstaat (Cologne, 1987). Karniel, Josef, Die Toleranzpolitik Kaiser Josephs II. (Gerlingen, 1986). Ka'rolyi, A´rpa'd, Ne´metu´jva´ri gf. Batthyańy Lajos elso˝ magyar miniszterelno¨k fo˝benja´ro´ po¨re (2 vols., Bp., 1932). Ka'szonyi, Da'niel, Magyarhon ne´gy korszaka (1868, Hungarian trans. by D. Kosa´ry, Bp., 1977). Kazinczy, Ferenc, Mu˝vei, ed. M. Szauder (2 vols., Bp., 1979). Kecskeme'ti, Ka'roly, ‘La Seánce circulaire de la die`te hongroise a` la fin de l’ancien re´gime’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 6 (1986), 135–47. Keme'ny, Zsigmond, Va´ltozatok a to¨rteńelemre, ed. Gy. To´th (Bp., 1982). Keresztesi, Jo'zsef, Krońika Magyarorsza´g polga´ri és egyha´zi ko¨ze´lete´bo˝l a 18. sza´zad ve´geń (Pest, 1868). Kessler, Wolfgang, Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft in Kroatien und Slawonien in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Historiographie und Grundlagen (Mun., 1981). Khevenhu¨ller-Metsch, Johann J., Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias: Tagebuch, ed. R. Khevenhu¨ller-Metsch and H. Schlitter (8 vols., V., 1907–72). Kinsky, Franz Joseph, Erinnerungen u¨ber einen wichtigen Gegenstand (Pr., 1773). ¨ sterreich, 1848–1918 (V., 1968). Klabouch, Jirˇ'i , Die Gemeindeselbstverwaltung in O ˇ ´ ´ ´ ˇ Kli'ma, Arnost, Manufakturnı obdobı v Cechach (Pr., 1955). Klingenstein, Grete, Der Aufstieg des Hauses Kaunitz (Go¨ttingen, 1975). —— ‘Modes of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in 18th-Century Habsburg Politics’, AHY 24 (1993), 1–16. —— and Szabo, F. A. J. (ed.), Staatskanzler Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg, 1711–94: Neue Perspektiven zu Politik und Kultur der europaïschen Aufkla¨rung (Graz, 1996). * Kobler, G. (comp.), Historisches Lexikon der deutschen La¨nder (Mun., 1988). Konvitz, J. W., Cartography in France, 1660–1848: Science, Engineering and Statecraft (Chicago, 1987). * Kopeczi, B., et al. (ed.), Ra´koćzi-tanulmańyok (Bp., 1980). —— et al. (ed.), Erde´ly to¨rteńete (3 vols., Bp., 1986). —— and Sziklay, L. (ed.), ‘Sorsotok elo˝re ne´zze´tek’: a francia felvila´gosoda´s és a magyar kultu´ra (Bp., 1975). Kopetzky, Franz, Josef und Franz von Sonnenfels (V., 1882). KoRˇ alka, JiRˇ'i , Tschechen im Habsburgerreich und in Europa, 1815–1914 (V./Munich, 1991). —— Frantisˇek Palacky´, 1798–1876: zˇivotopis (Pr., 1999). Kosa'ry, Domokos, Kossuth Lajos a reformkorban (Bp., 1946). —— Bevezete´s a magyar to¨rteńelem forra´saiba és irodalma´ba (3 vols., Bp., 1951–8). —— Mu˝velo˝de´s a XVIII. sza´zadi Magyarorsza´gon (Bp., 1980).

Select Bibliography

311

Kossuth, Lajos, Ira´sok és besze´dek 1848–9-bo˝l, ed. T. Katona (Bp., 1987). Kostic', Mita, Grof Koler kao kulturnoprosvetni reformator kod Srba u Ugarskoi u XVIII. veku (Belgrade, 1932). Kova'cs, E[lisabeth] (ed.), Katholische Aufkla¨rung und Josephinismus (Mun., 1979). Kova'cs, E[ndre] (ed.), Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete, 1848–90 (2 vols., Bp., 1979). Kretschmer, I., et al. (eds.), Lexikon zur Geschichte der Kartographie (2 vols., V., 1986). Kroupa, JiRˇ'i , Alchymie ˇsteˇstı´: pozdnı´ osvıćenstvı´ a moravska´ spolecˇnost (Brno, 1988). Lamberg, Maximilian, Me´morial d’un mondain (2 vols., L., 1776). Lemberg, Eugen, Grundlagen des nationalen Erwachens in Bo¨hmen (Reichenberg, 1932). Les'nodorski, Bogus£aw, Les Jacobins polonais (Paris, 1965). ¨ sterreich (2 vols., V., 1776–8). Luca, Ignaz de, Das gelehrte O Ludvi'kovsky', Jaroslav, Dobrovske´ho klasicka´ humanita (Brat., 1933). Lukowski, Jerzy, Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697–1795 (L., 1991). ¨ sterreich und die deutsche Frage im 19. und 20. Lutz, H., and Rumpler, H. (ed.), O Jahrhundert (V., 1982). ¨ sterreich (5 vols., V., Maass, F. (ed.), Der Josephinismus: Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in O 1951–61). Macartney, C. A., The Habsburg Empire, 1790–1918 (L., 1968). McCagg, William O., A History of Habsburg Jews, 1670–1918 (Bloomington/ Indianapolis, 1989). Ma'lyusz, Eleme'r, A tu¨relmi rendelet: II. Jo´zsef és a magyar protestantizmus (2 vols., Bp., 1939). —— (ed.), Sańdor Lipo´t fo˝herceg na´dor iratai, 1790–5 (Bp., 1926). Marczali, Henrik, Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete II. Jo´zsef kora´ban (3 vols., Bp., 1885–8). —— Magyarorsza´g to¨rteńete III. Ka´rolyto´l a bećsi congressusig, 1711–1815 (Bp., 1898). —— Az 1790/1-diki orsza´ggyu˝le´s (2 vols., Bp., 1907). Maria Theresia als Ko¨nigin von Ungarn: Ausstellung Schloß Halbturn ([Eisenstadt], 1980). Marko', Ilona, II. Jo´zsef és az erde´lyi sza´szok (Bp., 1940). Martius, Irmgard, Großo¨sterreich und die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen, 1848–59 (Mun., 1957). Mat’a, Petr, Sveˇt ˇceske´ aristokracie, 1500–1700 (Pr., 2004). Matauschek, T. A., OSB (comp.), Normalien-Nachschlagebuch fu¨r Lehrer und Direktoren der oesterreichischen o¨ffentlichen Gymnasien (Pr., 1857). Matsche, Franz, Die Kunst im Dienst der Staatsidee Kaiser Karls VI: Ikonographie, Ikonologie und Programmatik des ‘Kaiserstils’ (2 vols., Berlin, 1981). ¨ sterreich als ‘katholische Großmacht’: Ein Traum zwischen Revolution Mayer, Gottfried, O und liberaler A¨ra (V., 1989). Megner, Karl, Beamte: Wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte des k. k. Beamtentums (V., 1985). Menzel, Beda F., Abt Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch von Brˇevnov-Braunau (Ko¨nigstein i.Ts., 1969). Meszle'nyi, Antal, A jozefinizmus kora Magyarorsza´gon, 1780–1846 (Bp., 1934). —— A magyar hercegprı´ma´sok arcke´psorozata, 1707–1945 (Bp., 1970). Meyer, Bernhard [anon.], Ru¨ckblick auf die ju¨ngste Entwicklungs-Periode Ungarns (1857; repr. V., 1903).

312

Select Bibliography

Meyer, Henry C., Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815–1945 (The Hague, 1955). Meynert, Hermann, Geschichte der Ereignisse in der o¨sterreichischen Monarchie wa¨hrend der Jahre 1848 und 1849 (V., 1853). Michaud, Claude, ‘Lumie`res, franc-maçonnerie et politique a` la fin du 18e sie`cle’, Dix-huitie`me sie`cle, 12 (1980), 327–79. Miskolczy, Gyula, A kamarilla a reformkorszakban (Bp., 1938). Mitrofanov, Paul [Pavel], Josef II.: Seine politische und kulturelle Ta¨tigkeit (Ger. trans., 2 vols., V., 1910). Moritsch, A. (ed.), Der Austroslavismus: Ein verfru¨htes Konzept zur politischen Neugestaltung Mitteleuropas (V., 1996). Morvay, Gyo˝zo˝, Galańthai gro´f Fekete Jańos (Bp., 1903). Mraz, G. (ed.), Maria Theresia als Ko¨nigin von Ungarn (Eisenstadt, 1984). Myl’nikov, A. S., Vznik na´rodneˇ osvıćenske´ ideologie v ˇceskyćh zemıćh 18. stoletı´ (Pr., 1974). —— Epokha prosveshcheniya v Cheshskych zemlyach (Moscow, 1977). Nagl, J. W., et al. (ed.), Deutsch-o¨sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, vol. iii: 1848–90 (V., 1930). Nagy, Istva'n, A magyar kamara, 1686–1848 (Bp., 1971). Nagy, Iva'n, Magyarorsza´g csala´dai (8 vols., Pest, 1857–68). Namier, Julia, Lewis Namier: A Biography (L., 1971). Namier, L. B., 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (L., 1946). Nehring, Karl (ed.), Flugbla¨tter und Flugschriften der ungarischen Revolution von 1848–9 (Mun., 1977). Obradovic', Dimitrije [Dositej], Life and Adventures, trans. and ed. G. R. Noyes (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1953). O’Brien, Charles H., Ideas of Religious Toleration at the Time of Joseph II (Philadelphia, 1969). Okey, Robin, ‘Central Europe/Eastern Europe: Behind the Definitions’, Past & Present, 137 (1992), 102–33. Oresko, R., et al. (ed.), Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Camb., 1997). Ormis, Ja'n V. (ed.), O recˇ a na´rod: slovenske´ na´rodne´ obrany z rokov 1832–48 (Brat., 1973). ¨ sterreich und Europa: Festschrift H. Hantsch (Graz, 1965). O Pajewski, Janusz, ‘Mitteleuropa’: studia z dziejo´w imperializmu niemieckiego w dobie pierwszej wojny ´swiatowej (Poznan´ 1959). Palacky', Frantisèk, Radhost: sbı´rka spisu˚ drobnyćh (3 vols., Pr., 1871–3). Papp-Va'ry, A., and Hrenko', P., Magyarorsza´g re´gi te´rke´peken (Bp., 1989). Pascu, S¸., and Cherestes¸iu, V. (ed.), Revolut¸ia de la 1848–9 din Transilvania (5 vols. so far, Buch., since 1977). Pech, Stanley Z., The Czech Revolution of 1848 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1969). Pettenegg, E. G. von (ed.), Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf (V., 1879). Philippi, P. (ed.), Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne/ Graz, 1967).

Select Bibliography

313

Pillersdorf, Franz von, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß (V., 1863). Piszker, Olive'r, Barokk vila´g Gyo˝regyha´zmegye´ben Zıćhy Ferenc gro´f pu¨spo¨kse´ge idejeń, 1743–83 (Pannonhalma, 1933). Plaschka, R. G. (ed.), Mitteleuropa-Konzeptionen in der ersten Ha¨lfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (V., 1995). ¨ sterreich im Europa der Aufkla¨rung (2 vols., V., —— and Klingenstein, G. (ed.), O 1985). —— and Mack, K. (ed.), Wegenetz europaïschen Geistes (V., 1983). Pogacˇnik, Jozˇe, Bartholomaüs Kopitar: Leben und Werk (Mun., 1978). Pons, Rouven, ‘Wo der gekro¨nte Lo¨we hat seinen Kayser-Sitz’: Herrschaftsrepra¨sentation am Wiener Kaiserhof zur Zeit Leopolds I (Egelsbach, 2001). Pope, Giles, ‘The Political Ideas of Lorenz Stein and their Influence on Rudolf Gneist and Gustav Schmoller’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1985). Prazˇa'k, Albert, Cˇeske´ obrozenı´ (Pr., 1948). Prazˇa'k, Richard, Mad’arska´ reformovana´ inteligence v ˇceske´m obrozenı´ (Pr., 1962). —— Cseh-magyar pa´rhuzamok: tanulmańyok a 18–19. sza´zadi mu˝velo˝de´sto¨rteńeti kapcsolatoko´l (Bp., 1991). —— Cˇesko-mad’arske´ kulturnı´ vztahy, od osvıćenstvı´ do roku 1848 (Brno, 1994). Preiss, Pavel, Boje s dvouhlavou sanı´: Frantisˇek Antonıń Sporck a baroknı´ kultura v Cˇechaćh (2nd edn., Pr., 2003). Prignitz, Christoph, Vaterlandsliebe und Freiheit: Deutscher Patriotismus von 1750 bis 1850 (Wiesbaden, 1981). Prodan, David, Supplex Libellus Valachorum: The Political Struggle of the Romanians in Transylvania during the 18th Century (Buch., 1971). Prokesˇ, Jaroslav, Pocˇa´tky ˇceske´ spolecˇnosti nauk do konce 18. stoletı´ (Pr., 1938). Puka'nszky, Be'la, Erde´lyi sza´szok és magyarok (Pećs, 1943). —— Ne´met polga´rsa´g magyar fo¨ldo¨n (Bp., [1944]). Pulszky, Ferenc, E´letem és korom (2 vols., Bp., 1884). Pyrker, Johann L., Mein Leben: 1772–1847, ed. A. P. Czigler (V., 1966). Rado', Sa'ndor, Das Deutschtum in Ungarn (Berlin, 1903). Radonic', J., and Kostic', M., (ed.), Srpske privilegije od 1690 do 1792 (Belgrade, 1954). Rapant, Daniel, K pocˇiatkom mad’arizaćie (2 vols., Brat., 1927–31). —— Slovensky´ prestolny´ prosbopis z roku 1842 (2 vols., Liptovsky´ Sva¨ty´ Mikula´ˇs, 1943). Rebro, Karol, Urba´rska regulaćia Ma´rie Tere´zie a poddanske´ u´pravy Jozefa II. na Slovensku (Brat., 1959). Redlich, Josef, Das o¨sterreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem (2 vols. in 3, Leipzig, 1920–6). —— Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria (L., 1929). Reinalter, H. (ed.), Joseph von Sonnenfels (V., 1988). ¨ sterreich unter Maria Theresia’, Reinhardt, Rudolf, ‘Zur Kirchenreform in O Zeitschrift fu¨r Kirchengeschichte, 72 (1966), 105–19. Re've'sz, Imre, Bećs Debrecen ellen: Va´zlatok Domokos Lajos élete´bo˝l és mu˝ko˝de´se´bo˝l (Bp., 1966). Re've'sz, La'szlo', Die Anfa¨nge des ungarischen Parlamentarismus (Mun., 1968). Rogge, Walter, Oesterreich von Vila´gos bis zur Gegenwart (3 vols., Leipzig/V., 1872–9).

314

Select Bibliography

Rumpler, H., and Urbanitsch, P. (ed.), Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, vol. vii (V., 2000); cf. Wandruszka and Urbanitsch (ed.). Sahlins, Peter, ‘National Frontiers Revisited: France’s Boundaries since the Seventeenth Century’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990), 1423–51. * Sa'rkozi, Zolta'n, Az erde´lyi sza´szok a nemzeti ébrede´s kora´ban, 1790–1848 (Bp., 1963). Schamschula, Walter, Die Anfa¨nge der tschechischen Erneuerung und das deutsche Geistesleben (Mun., 1973). Schaser, Angelika, Josephinische Reformen und sozialer Wandel in Siebenbu¨rgen (Stuttgart, 1989). Schindling, A., and Ziegler, W. (ed.), Die Kaiser der Neuzeit, 1519–1918 (Mun., 1990). Schlett, Istva'n, Eo¨tvo¨s Jo´zsef (Bp., 1987). Schlitter, Hanns, ‘Die Wiener Regierung und die ungarische Opposition im Jahre ¨ sterreichs, 4 (V., 1908), 243–95. 1845’, Beitra¨ge zur neueren Geschichte O ¨ sterreichs Vorma¨rz (4 vols., Zurich etc., 1920). —— Aus O * Schlozer, August L., Kritische Sammlungen zur Geschichte der Deutschen in Siebenbu¨rgen (3 vols., Go¨ttingen, 1795–7; repr. Cologne/V., 1979). Schmidt, J., ‘Voltaire und Maria Theresia: Franzo¨sische Kultur des Barock in ihren ¨ sterreich’, Mitteilungen des Vereins fu¨r Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 11 Beziehungen zu O (1931), 73–115. ¨ sterreich: Milita¨r, Staat und Gesellschaft, Schmidt-Brentano, Antonio, Die Armee in O 1848–67 (Boppard a.R., 1975). Schroeder, Paul W., Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert (Ithaca, NY, 1972). Schuller, Georg A., Samuel von Brukenthal (2 vols., Mun., 1967–9). * ¨ sterreichs Bevo¨lkerungspolitik unter Maria Theresia, vol. i Schunemann, Konrad, O [n.m.p.] (Berlin [1935]). Schwicker, Johann H., Politische Geschichte der Serben in Ungarn (Bp., 1880). Sheehan, James J., German History, 1770–1866 (Ox., 1989). Silagi, Denis, Ungarn und der geheime Mitarbeiterkreis Josephs II. (Mun., 1960). Somogyi, E´va, A birodalmi centralizaćio´to´l a dualizmusig, az osztra´k-ne´met libera´lisok u´tja a kiegyeze´shez (Bp., 1976). —— (ed.), Polga´rosoda´s Ko¨ze´p-Euro´pa´ban: tanulmańyok Hana´k Pe´ter 70. szu¨lete´snapja´ra (Bp., 1991). So˝te'r, I., (ed.), A magyar irodalom to¨rteńete (6 vols., Bp., 1964–6). Springer, Anton, Geschichte Oesterreichs seit dem Wiener Frieden (2 vols., Leipzig, 1863–5). —— Aus meinem Leben (Berlin, 1892). Srbik, Heinrich von, Metternich, der Staatsmann und der Mensch (3 vols., Mun., 1925–54). —— Deutsche Einheit: Idee und Wirklichkeit vom Heiligen Reich bis Ko¨niggra¨tz (4 vols., Mun., 1935–42). Steinacker, Ruprecht, ‘Jakob Glatz und die Entstehung des ungarndeutschen Volksbewußtseins’, in Festschrift Roland Steinacker (Stuttgart, 1960), 126–53. Stirk, P. (ed.), Mitteleuropa: History and Prospects (Edinburgh, 1994).

Select Bibliography

315

Sto¨lzl, Christoph, Die A¨ra Bach in Bo¨hmen: Sozialgeschichtliche Studien zum Neoabsolutismus, 1849–59 (Mun./V., 1971). Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven, 1994). Sundhaussen, Holm, Der Einfluß der Herderschen Ideen auf die Nationsbildung bei den Vo¨lkern der Habsburger Monarchie (Mun., 1973). ¨ sterreichs Vergangenheit und Gegenwart Sutter, Rotraut, Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen in O (Innsbruck, 1976). Szabo', Dezso˝, A magyarorsza´gi u´rbe´rrendeze´s to¨rteńete Ma´ria Tere´zia kora´ban (Bp., 1933). Szabo, Franz A. J., Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism, 1753–80 (Camb., 1994). Szaka'ly, Orsolya, Egy va´llalkozo´ fo˝nemes, Vay Miklo´s ba´ro´, 1756–1824 (Bp., 2003). Sze'chenyi, Istva'n [anon.], Ein Blick auf den anonymen ‘Ruckblick’ welcher fu¨r einen vertrauten Kreis in verha¨ltnisma¨ßig wenigen Exemplaren im Monate Oktober 1857, in Wien, erschien. Von einem Ungarn (L., 1859). —— Naploí, ed. Gy. Viszota (6 vols., Bp., 1925–39). —— A Magyar Akade´mia ko¨ru¨l, ed. G. Szigethy (Bp., 1981). Szekfu˝, Gy. (ed.), Iratok a magyar a´llamnyelv ke´rde´seńek to¨rteńete´hez, 1790–1848 (Bp., 1926). Szinnyei, Jo'zsef, Magyar ´ıro´k élete és munkaí (14 vols., Bp., 1891–1913). Szo˝gye'ny-Marich, La'szlo', Emle´kiratai (3 vols., Bp., 1903–18). Tafferner, A. (ed.), Quellenbuch zur donauschwa¨bischen Geschichte (3 vols., Mun./ Stuttgart, 1974–8). Taka'ts, Sa'ndor, Ke´mvila´g Magyarorsza´gon (2nd edn., Bp., 1980). Taylor, A. J. P., The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (L., 1954; repr. 1971). Teutsch, Friedrich, Die Siebenbu¨rger Sachsen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Hermannstadt, 1924). Thim, Jo'zsef, A magyarorsza´gi 1848–9-iki szerb felkele´s to¨rteńete (3 vols., Bp., 1930–40). Thun, Leo, Die Stellung der Slovaken in Ungarn (Pr., 1843). Tibensky', J. (ed.), K pocˇiatkom slovenske´ho na´rodne´ho obrodenia (Brat., 1964). Till, Rudolf, Hofbauer und sein Kreis (V., 1951). Tobolka, Zdeneˇk V., Politicke´ deˇjiny ˇceskoslovenske´ho na´roda od r. 1848 azˇ do dnesˇnı´ doby (4 vols., Pr., 1932–7). —— and Hora'k, F. (comp.), Knihopis ˇceskyćh a slovenskyćh tisku˚, vol. ii (9 pts, Pr., 1939–67). Tomko, Josef, Die Errichtung der Dio¨zesen Zips, Neusohl und Rosenau, 1776, und das ko¨nigliche Patronatsrecht in Ungarn (V., 1968). Tro'csa'nyi, Zsolt, Habsburg-politika és Habsburg-kormańyzat Erde´lyben, 1690–1740 (Bp., 1988). Trommler, F., and McVeigh, J. (ed.), America and the Germans: An Assessment of a 300Year History (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1985). Turba, Gustav, Die Grundlagen der Pragmatischen Sanktion (2 vols., V., 1911–12). Turczynski, Emanuel, Konfession und Nation: Zur Fru¨hgeschichte der serbischen und ruma¨nischen Nationsbildung (Du¨sseldorf, 1976). Urba'n, Alada'r, Batthyańy Lajos miniszterelno¨kse´ge (Bp., 1986). Urban, Otto, Cˇeska´ spolecˇnost, 1848–1918 (Pr., 1982).

316

Select Bibliography

Valjavec, Fritz, Der Josephinismus (2nd edn., Mun., 1945). —— Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu Su¨dosteuropa (5 vols., Mun., 1953–70). Varga, Ja'nos, Helye´t kereso˝ Magyarorsza´g (Bp., 1982). —— Kereszttu˝zben a Pesti Hirlap: az ellenze´ki és a ko¨ze´putas liberalizmus elva´la´sa 1841–42-ben (Bp., 1983). Varga, Ja'nos J., ‘Berendeze´si tervek a to¨ro¨k kiu˝ze´seńek az ido˝szaka´ban: az Einrichtungswerk’, Sz. 125 (1991), 449–86, 500–16. Vermes, Ga'bor, Istvań Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist (Boulder, Colo., 1985). Vlcˇek, Jaroslav, Deˇjiny ˇceske´ literatury, vol. ii (Pr.,1940). Wandruszka, A., and Urbanitsch, P. (ed.), Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918 (6 vols., V., 1973–93); cf. Rumpler and Urbanitsch (ed.). Wangermann, Ernst, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials: Government Policy and Public Opinion in the Habsburg Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution (L., 1959). —— Aufkla¨rung und staatsbu¨rgerliche Erziehung: Gottfried van Swieten als Reformator des o¨sterreichischen Unterrichtswesens, 1781–91 (V., 1978). Wehrl, Franz, ‘Der ‘‘neue Geist’’: Eine Untersuchung der Geistesrichtungen des Klerus ¨ StA 20 (1967), 36–114. in Wien von 1750–90’, MO Weidlein, Johann, Deutsche Schuld in Ungarn? Der madjarische Mythos von der deutschen Gefahr (Schorndorf [Wu¨rttemberg], 1966). Wertheimer, Ede, Ausztria és Magyarorsza´g a tizenkilencedik sza´zad elso˝ tizede´ben (2 vols., Bp., 1890–2). Wessele'nyi, Miklo's, Szo´zat a magyar és szla´v nemzetise´g u¨gye´ben, ed. A´. Dea´k (Bp., 1992). Wilson, Duncan, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanovic´ Karazˇic´, 1787–1864: Literacy, Literature and National Independence in Serbia (Ox., 1970). Winner, Gerhard, Die Klosteraufhebungen in Niedero¨sterreich und Wien (V., 1967). Winter, Eduard, Der Josefinismus und seine Geschichte (Bru¨nn, 1943; 2nd edn., as Der Josefinismus, Berlin, 1962). —— Fru¨haufkla¨rung (Berlin, 1966). Wirkner, Ludwig, Meine Erlebnisse: Bla¨tter aus dem Tagebuche meines o¨ffentlichen Wirkens vom Jahre 1825 bis 1852 (Pressburg, 1879). Wolf, Hans, Das Schulwesen des Temesvarer Banats im 18. Jahrhundert (Baden bei Wien, 1935). Wolny, Reinhold J., Die josephinische Toleranz unter besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung ihres geistlichen Wegbereiters J. L. Hay (Mun., 1973). Wright, William E., Serf, Seigneur and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in EighteenthCentury Bohemia (Minneapolis, 1966). Wurzbach, Constant von, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich (60 vols., V., 1856–91). Zedler, J. H., (ed.), Großes vollsta¨ndiges Universal Lexicon (54 vols., Halle/Leipzig, 1732–50). Zieglauer, Ferdinand von, Die politische Reformbewegung in Siebenbu¨rgen in der Zeit Josephs II. und Leopolds II. (V., 1881).

Index I have used the following sets of abbreviations: 1/for languages in place-names: Cr[oatian], Cz[ech], G[erman], H[ungarian], It[alian], P[olish], R[umanian], S[erbian], Sl[ovak], Slov[ene] 2/for persons: a[rch]b[isho]p, a[rch]d[uke], b[aron], b[isho]p, c[ount], d[uke], e[mperor] or e[mpress], gen[eral] (or higher military rank), H[oly] R[oman] E[mperor], k[ing], pr[ince], qu[een]. The symbol ‘ ! ’ indicates that the given title was awarded, not inherited Abbt, Thomas 62 Acton, John Dalberg, ! b., historian 152, 275, 287 administration, see bureaucracy/ administration agrarian reform, and Urbarium (peasant regulation, 1767) xv, 20–2 Ahrens, Heinrich 277 Albert, Michael 240 Albert of Saxe-Teschen, d., palatine of Hungary 20, 22, 28, 72 Albrecht, ad., gen. 271 Alexander I, e. of Russia 164, 218 Alexander Leopold (Sańdor Lipo´t), ad., palatine of Hungary 175 Alsace 128 Althan family 86 Altransta¨dt, peace of 39 Anabaptists 81 Andra´ssy, Gyula, c. 207, 235, 238, 239, 260, 289 Andrew II, k. of Hungary 213 Andrian-Werburg, Victor, b. 251 Angerstein, Georg Zacharias 42 Angyal, Da´vid, historian 239, 241 Ansbach 118 Apaćzai Csere, Jańos 137 Apponyi, Gyo¨rgy, c. 183, 189, 190 April Laws (of 1848 in Hungary) 173, 176, 253, 256 Arad (H., now R.) 163, 194 architecture 9 and imperial idea 10–11 aristocracy viii, 68 and Austria, neo-absolutist period 271–2 and Bohemia 86–7 and Hungary privileges of 13, 18 role of 19–20 army: and the Enlightenment 31, 43 and establishment of common Habsburg viii, 6

and Francis Joseph 270–1 and rising cost of 31–2 and role of 30–2 and role of officer corps 68 and unitary nature of 174 Arneth, Alfred von, historian 264, 274, 297 art, and imperial idea 10–11 and Enlightenment 71–2 Arz von Straussenburg, Arthur, ! b., gen. 226 Aschbach, Joseph 275 n38 Aufkla¨rung, see Enlightenment Augustinian order 51 Ausgleich, see Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867) Austerlitz (G.; Cz. Slavkov), battle of xv, 198, 207 Austria vii, viii, 3, 129 and administrative reform 13 and Austro-Hungarian Compromise 191–2, 205, 206–7, 238, 245, 260, 262, 290 Austro-Hungarian alienation 265 Dualism 263 nature of 246 and court, reduced role of 72 and education, Catholic Church 274 and France, cultural influence of 58–9 and Germany: cultural influence of 63–4 immigration from 211 and governance of: Bohemian participation in 94–6, 198, 199 Hungarian participation in 187, 196, 198–9, 249 and Hungary: attitudes towards 187–90, 231–2, 251 cross-border connections 249–50, 251–2, 264–5 debate in Cisleithanian Reichstag (1848) 253–5 incorporation of 5–7 mutual ignorance/unconcern 264 Napoleonic wars 248

318

Index

Austria (cont.) nature of relationship 229, 246–7 neo-absolutist period 280, 281–2 October Diploma (of 1860) 205, 206, 258–9 Old Conservatives’ proposals 258–9 perceived distinctiveness of 248–9 popular opinion 263–4 revolutionary period (1848–9) 252–3, 255 role of liberals 260–2 and neo-absolutism 97–8, 203–5 achievements of 292 army 270–1 Austrian-Papal Concordat 273, 276 Catholic church 273–5 centralized administration 271 constitutional changes 285–7 conventional account of 267–8 Crimean War 284 economic achievements 269 economic conditions 283 education 274 failure of 290–2 features of 268–9 German identity 277–9 German language 278 German question 287–90 Hungary 286–7 influence of liberalism 276–7 innovative government 268–9 innovative nature of 268 nationality question 279–82 position of nobility 271–2 problems with Catholic programme 275–6 Prussia 283–4 restructuring of 285 unified Reich 283–4 and obstacles to territorial consolidation: Counter-Reformation 7–9 imperial idea 9–12 and patriotism, development of 61–3 and Prussian-Austrian frontier 124 and revolutionary period (1848–9) xvi, 252–6 imposed constitution 255–6 and secret police 188 and territorial gains of 3–4 Austrian Academy of Sciences 64, 274 Austrian Succession, War of the xiv, 56–7, 91–2 Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867) xvii, 191–2, 205, 206–7, 238, 245, 260, 262, 290 and Austro-Hungarian alienation 265 and Dualism 263 and nature of 246

Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ix and composition of 290 n111 Austro-Slavism 253, 259, 280 Babits, Miha´ly 239 Bach, Alexander ! b. xvii, 238, 257, 268 n5, 276 and clerical stance of 273 and dismissal of 204–5, 236, 285 and Hungary 256, 281, 282 and repression under 267 Bach, Johann Sebastian 214 Bachynskii, Andrej, bp. 143 n29, 161 Baden 117, 118 Bajza, Jozef Ignać 145 Balassa, Ferenc, ! c. 19, 22, 32 Baldacci, Anton, b. 188 Balkans 3, 14 n31 Balogh, Pe´ter 179 Baltic Germans 218, 219 Banat of Temesva´r xiv, 6, 32–3, 124, 139, 147 and incorporation of into Hungary 27–8 Barcsay, A´braha´m 31 n36 Barit¸iu, Gheorghe 165 Barkoćzy, Ferenc, c., abp. 53 Ba˘rnut¸iu, Simeon 148, 165 Ba´roćzi, Sańdor 31 n36, 140 n19 Baroque: and conditioning factors of 57 and reaction against 37, 44, 49–50, 60 and role of the visual 57 Ba´rsony, Gyo¨rgy, bp. 8 Bartenstein, Johann Christoph ! b. 41, 44 Batthyańy, Ignać, c., bp. 53 Batthyańy, Jo´zsef, c., abp., cardinal 23, 26, 52–3 Batthyańy, Ka´roly, ! pr., gen. 32, 59, 150 and Maria Theresa on 21 and prominence of 19, 29, 196 as soldier 30 Batthyańy, Lajos, c., palatine of Hungary 19, 21 Batthyańy, Lajos, c., Hungarian premier 152, 153, 176, 253 and constitutionalism 231 and judicial murder of 236 and revolutionary period (1848–9) 233 Bauernfeld, Eduard von 280 Baumgartner, Andreas, ! b. 274 Baussner, Bartholomaeus 216 Bavaria xiv, 63, 279, 297 and invasion of Bohemia 91–2 Beccaria, Cesare, marquis 68 Bedekovich family 180 Bedeus von Scharberg, Joseph ! b. 221 Bee´r, Pe´ter 194 Beidtel, Ignaz 95–6

Index Bel (Be´l), Matthias 40, 139–40 Belcredi, Egbert, c. 272, 291 n114 Belcredi, Richard, c., Austrian premier xvii, 206, 259, 262, 289 Belgrade xv, 165 Beller, Steven, historian 224 Bem, Jo´zef, gen. 222 Benedek, Ludwig/Lajos 249 Benedict XIV, pope 51 Benedictine order 51 Benesˇ, Eduard (Edvard) 302 Benko˝, Sa´muel 141 Bentinck, Lord William 137 Benya´k, Berna´t 52 Berchtold, Leopold, c. 194 Berg, Wolfgang 233 Berlin xvii, 63 Bernola´k, Anton 145, 157, 159 Berzeviczy, Gergely, b. 141 Bessel, Gottfried ( Johann Franz), abbot 51 Bessenyei, Gyo¨rgy 31 n36, 137 Beust, Friedrich Ferdinand, ! c. 206–7, 238, 262, 290 Biegeleben, Ludwig, b. 288 Binder, Georg Paul, bp. 222 Bismarck (-Scho¨nhausen), Otto, ! pr. 237–8, 239, 270, 284, 290, 297 Bistritz (H. Beszterce, now R. Bistrit¸a) 213 Blaj (R.; H. Bala´zsfalva, G. Blasendorf) 148, 163, 165, 167, 168 Blumauer, Alois 135 Blu¨megen, Heinrich Cajetan, c. 95 Bod, Pe´ter 139 Bodin, Jean 48 Bohemia viii, 10, 42, 52 and 1848–49 revolutionary period 97 and admiration of Renaissance humanism 47 and aristocracy 68 and Bavarian invasion (1741) 91–2 and Bohemian Revolt (1618–20) 83–5 and characteristics of 75–6 and culture 88 and diet xiv, xv, 77, 80, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 198 and economic development 92, 93 and Enlightenment origins 49–50 and Ferdinand I 81–2 election of 75, 78 exploitation of inter-provincial rivalries 79–80 as outsider 78–9 policy of limited dominion 79 qualities of 78 religious divisions 81 and Ferdinand II: Counter-Reformation 85

319 deposed 84 political/administrative consolidation 85–6 restoration of 85 and frontiers, internal borders 118, 130 and German migration 211 and Habsburg Monarchy: Bohemian/Hungarian relationship to compared 196–8 centrality to 197, 198 claims to Bohemia 77–8 dependence on Bohemia 196 integration of political elite 88–90, 93 participation in administration of 94–6, 198, 199 policy of 196 and historiography of 194 and history 66–7 and Holy Roman Empire 76, 90 and Hungary: and 1848 revolution 203 antagonism between 195 Austro-Hungarian Compromise 206–7 comparison with 198–203, 208 elite cooperation 205 February Patent 206, 263 Hohenwart negotiations 207–8 resentment of 90 studies of contacts between 194–5 and Hussite revolt 78 and inter-provincial tensions 79–80, 88 and Joseph II 93, 198 and Josephinism 92–3 and Lusatia 79–80 ceded to Saxony 88 and Maria Theresa: political/administrative consolidation 92 recaptured by 91–2 and Maximilian II 82 and Moravia 79–80, 88 and Napoleonic wars 93 and neo-absolutism 203–5, 281 and October Diploma 259 and patriotism, development of 64, 106 and Poland 77 and political elite 86–7 continuity of 92 prominence in Austrian government 94–6 taxation powers 87–8 and Pragmatic Sanction 91 and reintegration into European Renaissance 83 and religious divisions within 80–1, 83 and religious toleration 46, 93 and Rudolf II 82–3 religious divisions 83

320

Index

Bohemia (cont.) and Silesia 79–80, 88 loss of 92, 196 and taxation 87–8, 90 and union of crowns with neighbouring lands 76–7 Bohemian Brethren, Unity ( Jednota) of 49, 81 Bohemian Revolt xiv, 83–5 Bonfini, Antonio 47 Bonn, university of 278 Borie´, Egidius, ! b. 21, 27 Born, Ignaz von 40, 46, 47, 143 Bosnia xvii, 290 Bossuet, Jacques-Beńigne, bp. 48 Bourbon, house of 3 Brandenburg 10, 128 and German migration 211 Brandsch, Rudolf 225 Brazil, and German immigration 218 Brˇeclav (G. Lundenburg) 195 Breslau (G.; now P. Wrocław) 212, 278 Brno (Cz.; G. Bru¨nn) 92, 194 Browning, Robert 227 n50 Bruck, Karl Ludwig, ! b. 236, 273 n27, 276, 277, 283, 286, 297 Brukenthal, Samuel, ! b. 28, 32, 40, 66, 72, 135, 141–2, 156, 196, 220 Brunner, Sebastian 279 Brunswick, Antal, c. 20, 25, 182 Buda (H.; G. Ofen) 32, 33, 157 Budapest (before 1873 Buda-Pest or Pest-Buda) 173, 176, 186, 191, 228, 233, 234, 239, 241, 249, 252, 253, 259 Bund (German Confederation) ix, xvi, xvii, 283, 284, 297 Buol (-Schauenstein), Karl Ferdinand, c. 284, 285 bureaucracy/administration: and consolidation of viii, 85–6, 92 and foreign influences within 41 and Hungary 177–84 and neo-absolutist centralization 271 and participation in: Bohemians 94–6, 198, 199 Hungarians 187, 196, 198–9, 249 and reform of: Austria 13 Hungary 6–7, 19 Byron, George Gordon, b. 107 Calvinism 23, 39, 81 in Hungary 152–3 cameralism 5, 13, 60 Carafa, Antonio, c. 11, 12 Carlowitz, treaty of xiv, 123 see also Sremski Karlovci Carniola 129, 144

Caroline University (Prague) 78 cartography: and development of 119 and influences on 120 and military considerations 122–3 and state frontiers 121 Cassini family 119 Catherine II, the Great, e. of Russia 125 Catholic church and Catholicism, see Roman Catholicism censorship 50–1, 74 Central Africa 294 Central America 294 Central Asia 294 Central Australia 294 Central Europe, and use of term Austria and Prussia 296–8 ‘Central’ term 295 conceptual division of continent 295–6 ‘Europe’ term: application of 294–5 context of 295 functions of 303 geographical ideas 298–9 and inter-war interest in concept 302 Mitteleuropa 294, 297, 298–9 Austro-German debate over 299–300 Hungarian attraction to idea 301 Nazi doctrine and strategy 300–1 renewed use of term 303 Slav mistrust of 301–2 peak of influence of 294 post-1945 period 302–3 rival terms: East-Central Europe 303 Eastern Europe 303 use in geopolitics 299 vagueness of vii, 293–4 Charles, ad., d. of Teschen, gen. 73, 188 Charles Albert, elector of Bavaria 91 Charles IV, HRE and k. of Bohemia 76, 77, 78, 79 Charles V, HRE and k. of Spain 9, 78 Charles VI, HRE and k. of Bohemia and Hungary xiv, 7, 9, 13, 58 and depictions of 11 Chicago 217 Chodowiecki, Daniel 72 Chopin, Fre´de´ric François 110 Chorin, A´ron 194 Chorinsky, Ignaz, c. 96, 118 Chotek, Johann Rudolf, c. 96 Chotek, Joseph, c. 95 Chotek, Karel, c. 94 Chotek, Rudolf, c. 39, 95 Chouans 148 Chownitz, Julian 275

Index Cisleithania 236, 237, 246, 248, 253, 259, 261 and Austro-Hungarian Compromise 262 and debate in Cisleithanian Reichstag (1848) 253–5 citizenship 61, 137–8, 248 n10 and introduction of uniform 270 and separate citizenship 290 civil society 67–8 Clam-Martinitz, Heinrich Jaroslav, c. 205 clergy, and intellectual prominence of 50–3 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 117 collections (artistic) 72 Collegium Norbertinum (Prague) 51 Colloredo, Franz, pr. 95 Colloredo, Rudolf, ! pr. 95 Comenius (Komensky´), Jan Amos 194 Compromise, Austro-Hungarian (1867), see Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867) Confederation, German see Bund Cornova, Ignaz 49, 52 Cothmann, Anton 20, 22 Counter-Reformation: and Bohemia 85 and Counter-Counter-Reformation 44, 66 and doubts about achievements of 53–4 and idea of nationality 104 as obstacle to consolidation 7–9 court, and reduction of role of 72 Coxe, William 267 Cracow (P. Krako´w) 212, 214 Cranmer, Thomas, abp. 46 Credit-Anstalt bank 269 Crimean War 267, 284 Cˇrnojevic´, Arsenije, patriarch 8, 161 Croatia 12, 28, 106 and Illyrian movement 154 and Josephinism 144 and national consciousness 154 and pan-Slavism 110 and Roman Catholicism in 153–4 Csaplovics (Cˇaplovicˇ), Jan 249 culture: and governmental responsibility 73 and social foundations of 67–8 aristocracy 68 common people 69–70 middle class 68–9 Curzon line 131 and n40 Czech/Czechs 136, 143, 144, 259–60 see also Bohemia Czechoslovakia 132 Czernin, Humprecht Jan, c. 89 Czernin family 87 Czoernig, Carl, ! b. 269, 271, 276, 280 Dalmatia 27, 248, 290 n113 Danube, and river frontiers 122

321

d’Aviano, Marco 7 Daxner, Sˇtefan Marko 159 Dea´k, Ferenc 152, 237, 254, 260–2, 289 Debrecen 23 Delius, Christoph Traugott 43 Dercseńyi, Jańos Lajos, b. 252 Derkos, Ivan 140 Dessewffy, Aure´l, c. 184 Deutschendorf (G.; now Sl. Poprad) 155 Deutscher Schulverein 225, 240 diasporas: and concept of 209 and German migration 209–10 eastwards 210–11 ‘Germanizing’ impact of 211–12 and Nazism 227 and settlement patterns 210 see also Saxons of Transylvania Dickson, P. G. M., historian 34 Dietrichstein, Johann Karl, pr. 93, 198 Dietrichstein family 86, 89, 95 Dixon, Jeremiah 123 Dobner, Gelasius 47, 51 Dobrianskii, Adolf 161 Dobrovsky´, Josef 46, 47, 49, 52, 110, 143, 144, 201 Dual Alliance (of Austria-Hungary and Germany) xvii, 297 Dualism, and Austro-Hungarian Compromise 263 Du¨rer, Albrecht 214 Durich, Fortunat 46, 52, 144 Easter Article (1865) 261 economic development viii, 6 and Bohemia 92, 93 and East-Central Europe 103 and neo-absolutist achievements 269 Eder, Joseph Carl 221 n31 education: and Catholic church 274 and Jesuits 37 and Joseph II on 69 and Piarist order 38 and Ratio Educationis (1777) 25, 136 Eger (G.; now Cz. Cheb) 76 Einrichtungswerk (in Hungary) 5, 11 Eisenmann, Gottfried 234 Eisenmann, Louis, historian 245 Engel, Johann Christian von 232 England, and frontiers 120 Enlightenment: and citizenship 137–8 and cultural renewal 36 and fine arts 71–2 and French cultural influence 58–9 and historical treatment of 36–7 and historiography of 138

322 Enlightenment: (cont.) and Josephinism 36, 53, 135 and national consciousness 135 and nationality 105–6, 138–9, 145–6 and nature of German 59–60 and origins of 53–4 admiration of Renaissance humanism 47–8, 67 army 31, 43 Bohemia 49–50 bureaucracy 41 Catholicism 37–9 continued influence of clergy 50–3 Counter-Counter-Reformation 44, 66 free professions 42 historical perspectives 48–9, 66–7 influence of foreigners 38–43, 60–1 learned societies 43–4 Protestants 39 religious toleration 44–7, 65–6 and patriotism, development of 62 and reaction against baroque 37, 44, 49–50 and vernacular languages 136–7 Eo¨tvo¨s, Jo´zsef, b. 110, 113, 191, 192, 237, 250, 252, 254 and Austrocentrism of 282 and critical of corruption 184 and Franco-Prussian war 238 and German influence on 231 and pan-monarchicalism 264 and reforms of 166 and religious equality 152 Esterha´zy, Ferenc, c., chancellor of Hungary 19, 22, 26, 28, 32 Esterha´zy, Ka´roly, c., abp. 53 Esterha´zy, Miklo´s, c. 29 Esterha´zy, Miklo´s Jo´zsef, pr. 31 Esterha´zy, Pa´l, pr. 233 Esze, Tama´s 4 ethnicity, and frontiers 127, 131 Bohemia 130 Germany 128–30 Hungary 130 Magyars 127 Slavs 128 Eugene of Savoy, pr., gen. 9, 58, 72, 90 Falk, Miksa 262 Fańdly, Juraj 137, 145, 157 February Patent xvii, 206, 263, 286 and n94 Fekete, Gyo¨rgy, ! c. 20, 31 Fekete, Jańos, c. 31, 59 Felbiger, Johann Joseph, abbot 51 Felso˝ Fehe´r (H. county) 118, 130 Fenner von Fenneberg, Daniel 255

Index Ferdinand I, HRE, and k. of Bohemia and Hungary xiv, 81–2 election of 75, 78 exploitation of inter-provincial rivalries 79–80 as outsider 78–9 policy of limited dominion 79 qualities of 78 religious divisions 81 Ferdinand I, e. of Austria, k. of Bohemia and Hungary xvi Ferdinand II, HRE, and k. of Bohemia and Hungary 85 Counter-Reformation 85 deposed 84 political/administrative consolidation 85–6 restoration of 85 Fessler, Ignaz Aurel 52 Festetics, Gyo¨rgy, c. 33 Festetics, Pa´l, ! c. 20, 22, 25, 26, 28, 32, 196 feudalism, and abolition of 126 Ficquelmont, Ludwig, c. 253 fine arts 71–2 First World War: and impact on German immigrants 225, 226 and impact on Transylvanian Saxons 226–7 Fischer von Erlach, Josef Emanuel 10 Fischhof, Adolf 252, 254, 261 Fiume (It.; now Cr. Rijeka) 28, 32, 180 Forgaćh, Antal, c., chancellor of Hungary 205, 258 Forgaćh, Ferenc, b., bp. 47 Forgaćh, Jańos, c. 239 France xiv, xv, 3, 9 and Austria, cultural influence on 58–9 and frontiers domestic boundaries 126 internal tolls 117 natural frontiers 121–2 Francis I, d. of Lorraine, then HRE xiv, 59, 61 Francis II, HRE ¼ Francis I, e. of Austria, k. of Bohemia and Hungary xv, 175, 248, 270 Francis Joseph, e. of Austria, and k. of Hungary xvi, xvii, 167 and the army 270–1 and Austro-Hungarian Compromise 262 and centralized administration 271 and crowned emperor 270 and February Patent 206 and Frankfurt Fu¨rstentag 287–8 and the German question 287–90 and Laxenburg manifesto 284 and October Diploma 205, 206 on Old Conservatives 282

Index and Roman Catholic church 273 see also neo-absolutism Francisci, Jań 159 Franco-Prussian war xvii, 238 Frankfurt Parliament xvi, 128, 202 and Hungarian mission to 233–4, 253 Frankfurt Letter (of Palacky´) xvi, 202, 260 Franklin, Benjamin 216 Frantz, Constantin 298 Frederick II, the Great, k. of Prussia 63, 91, 218 and Partitions of Poland 125 and Prussian-Austrian frontier 124 Frederick William, elector of Brandenburg 10 Frederick William I, k. of Prussia 220 Frederick William II, k. of Prussia 63, 237 Freemasons 61, 65, 69 French: and linguistic fashion 59 and use of 26 French Revolution 3 and impact of 72–3, 93, 103 Friedjung, Heinrich, historian 265, 287 Friedmann, Bernhard 261 Friese, Friedrich 70 n43 frontiers: and artificial frontiers 122–5, 131 Austrian-Ottoman 123–4 French Revolution 125–6 Hungary 125 military considerations 122–4 Partitions of Poland 125 Prussian-Austrian 124 security considerations 131 self-determination 131, 132 Transylvania 125 and cartography: development of 119 influences on 120 role of 121 and changing perceptions of 132–3 and ethnicity 127, 131 Bohemia 130 Germany 128–30 Hungary 130 Magyars 127 Slavs 128 and etymology of term 115 and historic frontiers 126 survival of 132 and history of idea of 115–19 and Holy Roman Empire 117–18 and Hungarian-Styrian frontier 118–19 and international boundary disputes 124 and local borders 117–18 as markers of genuine divisions 117 and national identity 114–15, 120–1 and natural frontiers 121–2

323

and notion of 114 and rethinking concept of 123–6 and state frontiers 118, 120–1 and tariffs 117 funerals, and sobriety at 135 Gabriele, Angelo 5 Gagern, Max, b. 234, 275, 288 Gaj, Ljudevit 110, 129 Galicia xv, xvi, 27, 143, 248, 259, 290 n113 Gallas, Johann Wenzel, c. 90 Gebler, Tobias, b. 44, 61, 74 Gellner, Ernst, sociologist 101 Genersich, Johann 141 geopolitics, and use of term ‘Central Europe’ 299 George of Pode˘brady, k. of Bohemia 79 German: and emergence of 62 and imposition of 135, 150, 229 and neo-absolutist Austria 278 and promotion of 136 and use of 26 Germany/Germans 4, 10 and Austria, cultural influence on 63–4 and conceived as single cultural entity 58 and diasporas 209–10 and emergence of national language/ literature 62 and emigration from Holy Roman Empire 210 eastwards 210–11 ‘Germanizing’ impact of 211–12 Hungary 212–13 and emigration to United States 216–18, 225–6 and the Enlightenment, nature of 59–60 and frontiers: and ethnicity 128–30 internal borders 118 internal tolls 117 and Hungary 228 attitudes of 239–40 awareness of Slavs 232–3 Bismarck’s approach 237–8, 239 common destiny 233 dialogue halted 236 Franco-Prussian war 238 Frankfurt mission 233–4, 253 German minority 228–9 influence of language and culture 235 influence on reformist goals 230–1 kleinungarisch position 237 nationalist movements 240–1 perceptions of 231–3 promotion of Austro-German alliance 238–9 revolutionary period (1848–9) 233–5

324

Index

Germany/Germans (cont.) uneasy relations with 229 and patriotism, development of 62–3 see also Saxons of Transylvania Giannone, Pietro 41 Gindely, Anton, historian 281 Gladstone, William Ewart 160 Glatz, Eduard 155, 224, 231–2 Glatz, Jakob 155, 224, 231, 249 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von 96 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 67, 174, 232 Goldast, Melchior 48 Gołuchowski, Agenor, c. 285 Go¨ncz, A´rpa´d 228, 239 Go¨tt, Johann 222 Go¨ttingen, university of 69, 220, 229 and neoclassical school at 47 Gra¨fenberg (G.; now Cz. La´zne˘ Jesenı´k) 230 Grass, Theresia, neé Schwinghammer, b. 30 n32 Grassalkovich, Antal, ! c. 19–20, 22, 32, 196 Grauert, Wilhelm Heinrich 275 n38 Graz 76, 277 Great Britain xiv, xv and emergence of 3 and frontiers 120 and German immigration 218 Griespeck von Griespach, Florian 82 Grillparzer, Franz 231, 280 and n61 Gross-Hoffinger, Anton Johann 251 Gru¨n, Anastasius ( ¼ Auersperg, Anton, c.) 280 Gru¨nne, Karl Ludwig, c., gen. 258, 291 Gru¨nwald, Be´la 223, 240 Gu¨nther, Anton 275 n38, 276 Gustav Adolf-Verein 240 Gyrowetz, Adalbert 96 Habsburg Monarchy: and 1848–9 revolutionary period 97–8 and Bohemia: Bohemian/Hungarian relationship to compared 196–8 centrality of 197, 198 claims to 77–8 dependence on 196 integration of political elite 88–90, 93 participation in administration 94–6, 198, 199 policy towards 196 and court, reduced role of 72 and early centralizing attempts 247 and failure to adapt to state-based culture 73–4 and France, cultural influence of 58–9 and Germany, cultural influence of 63–4

and governance of: Bohemian participation in 94–6, 198, 199 Hungarian participation in 187, 196, 198–9 and Hungary: Bohemian/Hungarian relationship to compared 196–8 centrality of 198 dependence on 196 expansion into 3 participation in administration 187, 196, 198–9, 249 pattern of confrontation/ reconciliation 175–6 as peripheral to 196–7 religious policy 149–50, 168 and incorporation of Hungarian lands: Austrian plans for 5–6 Hungarian plans for 6–7 and nature of loyalty to viii, 61 and obstacles to territorial consolidation: Counter-Reformation 7–9 imperial idea 9–12 and patriotism, development of 61–3 and pre-1526 patrimony 76 and territorial expansion of 3–4 and Transylvania: divide and rule policy 28 expansion into 3 religious policy 151 status of 219 see also Austria; Bohemia; Hungary; Josephinism; neo-absolutism; Transylvania Hacquet, Balthasar 43 Hadik, Andra´s, ! c., gen. 30 Haen, Anton de 70 Hala´sz, Albert 301 Halle, university of 220, 229 Hamburg 236 Hamuljak, Martin 157 Hanover 10 Hantos, Eleme´r 301 Harrach family 86 Hartig, Franz de Paula, c. 268, 283 n80 Hasse, Ernst 240 Hassenstein of Lobkowitz, Bohuslav 47, 49 Hatzfeld, Karl, c. 95 Haugwitz, Friedrich Wilhelm, c. xv, 94, 197 Havlıćˇek (-Borovsky´), Karel 280 Hay, Johann Leopold, bp. 45 Haydn, Joseph 19 Hebbel, Friedrich 277, 280, 281 Heckenast, Guszta´v 264 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 107 Heidelberg, university of 278

Index Heidelberg Catechism 23 Heine, Gustav, ! b. 275 Heinke, Franz Joseph, ! b. 95 Helfert, (Joseph) Alexander, ! b. 274 Hell, Maximilian 38 Hentzi, Heinrich, gen. 249 Herberstein, Johann Karl, c., bp. 46, 52 Herczeg, Ferenc 240 Herder, Johann Gottfried 62, 63, 65, 67, 70 n43, 107, 232 Hermannstadt (G.; H. Nagyszeben, now R. Sibiu) 12, 40, 165, 213, 221–2 Heydendorff, Michael Conrad von 221 Hildebrandt, Johann Lucas von 10 Hissmann, Michael 220 historiography, and the Enlightenment 48–9, 66–7 Hitler, Adolf 225, 300, 302 Hock, Karl Ferdinand, ! b. 274, 276 and n43 Hodonıń (Cz.; G. Go¨ding) 195 Hodzˇa, Michal Miloslav 159 Hodzˇa, Milan 302 Hofbauer, Clemens Maria 151, 152, 273 Ho¨fken, Gustav 277, 278 Ho¨fler, Konstantin von, historian 275 Hohenwart, Karl, c., and negotiations (1871) xvii, 207–8 Holly´, Jań 157 Holy Roman Empire ix, xv, 193 and Bohemia 76, 90 and boundaries within 117–18 and Central Europe 296 and dissolution of 73, 198 and enfeeblement of 57 and German emigration from 210 eastward expansion 210–11, 218 ‘Germanizing’ impact of 211–12 Hungary 212–13 see also Saxons of Transylvania and imperial idea 9–11 and political ‘anarchy’ of 57 and revival of 57–8 Homann, Johann Baptist 119 Honterus, Johann 215 Horańyi, Elek 51, 139 Horea rising in Transylvania (1784) 163 Ho¨rnigk, Philipp Wilhelm von 5, 13, 63–4 Horva´th, Miha´ly, historian 33, 185 n42 Hroch, Miroslav, historian 101 Hu¨bner, Joseph Alexander, b. 270 n15, 272 n25, 283 n79, 286 n92 humanism, and admiration of Renaissance 47–8, 67 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk 252 Hunfalvy, Pa´l 240

325

Hungary: and administration of: brokerage function 179 common crown/country policies 183–4 counties 182 crown/country struggle 182–3 diet xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 17, 20, 21, 24, 28, 173–7, 182–3, 190, 250, 258–62, 286 divisions within opposition 184–5 lack of Hungarians in royal administration 187 linguistic nationalism 178 membership composition 179–82 national composition 178 political stagnation 185 recruitment to 178 reformist tendencies 179 royal agencies 177–81 Szećhenyi’s failure to reconcile crown/ country 185–7 and administrative reform 6–7, 19 and Austria: attitude of 187–90, 231–2, 251 cross-border connections 249–50, 251–2, 264–5 debate in Cisleithanian Reichstag (1848) 253–5 mutual ignorance/unconcern 264 Napoleonic wars 248 nature of relationship viii, 229, 246–7 neo-absolutist period 280, 281–2 October Diploma 205, 206, 258–9 Old Conservatives’ proposals 258–9 perceived distinctiveness of 248–9 popular opinion 263–4 revolutionary period (1848–9) 252–3, 255 role of liberals 260–2 and Austro-Hungarian Compromise 191–2, 205, 206–7, 238, 245, 260, 262, 290 Austro-Hungarian alienation 265 Dualism 263 nature of 246 and Bohemia: and 1848 revolution 203 antagonism between 195 Austrian neo-absolutism 203–5 Austro-Hungarian Compromise 206–7 comparison with 198–203, 208 elite cooperation 205 February Patent 206, 263 Hohenwart negotiations 207–8 studies of contacts between 194–5 and civil war (1848–9) 147–8, 166–9, 174 role of churches 148 and distinctiveness of 174 and ethnic diversity 149

326 Hungary: (cont.) and foreign views of 247 n5 and frontiers: border changes 125 county reform 130 internal borders 118 Styria 118–19 and German migration 211, 212–13 and Germany 228 attitudes towards 239–40, 247 n5 awareness of Slavs 232–3 Bismarck’s approach 237–8, 239 common destiny 233 dialogue halted 236 Franco-Prussian war 238 Frankfurt mission 233–4, 253 German minority 228–9 the German question 289 influence of language and culture 235 influence on reformist goals 230–1 kleinungarisch position 237 nationalist movements 240–1 perceptions of 231–3 promotion of Austro-German alliance 238–9 revolutionary period (1848–9) 233–5 romanticized by 232 uneasy relations with 229 and governance of 17–18, 22 use of nobles 19–20 and Habsburg Monarchy: Bohemian/Hungarian relationship to compared 196–8 centrality to 198 dependence on Hungary 196 expansion into Hungary 3 participation in administration of 187, 196, 198–9, 249 pattern of confrontation/ reconciliation 175–6 as peripheral to 196–7 religious policy 149–50, 168 and historiography of 191, 194 and incorporation of: Austrian plans for 5–6 Germanization 11–12 Hungarian plans for 6–7 and Josephinism 196 army 30–2 character of 34 conservative reaction to 150 failure under Joseph II 33–4, 197 indirect impact of 18 opposition to 229 Protestant reaction 140–1 Ratio Educationis (education reform, 1777) 25, 136

Index religious developments 22–5 state identity 27–30 Urbarium (peasant regulation 1767) 20–2 and language: as cause of internal friction 177 decay of Magyar 140 demands for Magyar 150–1, 176 impact of Magyar 177 imposition of German xv, 135, 150, 229 imposition of Magyar 153 introduction and use of 176–7 use of Magyar 26 and liberal transformation of (1848) 166 and neo-absolutism, constitutional changes 286–7 and noble privileges 13, 18 and obstacles to territorial consolidation: Counter-Reformation 7–9 imperial idea 11–12 and patriotism: development of 64 of royal servants 32 and political opposition 250 and Protestants in 65–6, 140–1, 149 German Lutherans 155 integration of Calvinists 152–3 Lutheran militancy 153 Saxon Lutherans 155–6 Slovak Lutherans 157–9 and Ra´koćzi rebellion 4 and religion: confessional diversity 149, 151 German Catholics 154–5 impact of liberal transformation (1848) 166 Orthodox Christians 161–5 rise of liberal Catholicism 151–2 Slovak Catholics 156–7 and revolutionary period (1848–9) 173–4, 190–1, 252–6 April Laws 173, 176, 253, 256 imposed constitution 255–6 and Rumanians 161, 163–4 nationality 164, 165 response to 1848 revolution 166, 167 Supplex Libellus Valachorum 164 and Ruthenes 160–1 and Serbians 161–3 nationality 164–5 opposition to Magyars 162 privileges of 161–2 response to 1848 revolution 166–7 and Slovaks in: Catholics 156–7 compared with Welsh 159–60 Lutherans 157–8

Index nationality 157, 159 petition against Magyars 158–9 and Uniate churches 149–50 see also Saxons of Transylvania Hurban, Miloslaw Josef (Jozef Miloslav) 159, 250 Hurter, Friedrich, historian 275 Hus, Jan 46, 78, 115 hussar uniforms 279–80 Hussites 46, 78 Hutten, Ulrich von 46 Hye von Glunek, Anton, ! b. 276 Iancu, Avram 167 iconography, and imperial idea 10–11 ideology: and imperial idea 9–12 and religion 22–3 Iglau (G.; now Cz. Jihlava) 76 Illyrian movement (of 1830s–40s in Croatia) 154 immigrants, and cultural role of in Austria 41–3, 60–1 imperial idea, as obstacle to territorial consolidation 9–12 Innsbruck xvi, 76 Institoris-Mossoćzy, Michal’ 142 ¨ sterreichische Institut fu¨r O Geschichtsforschung 274, 279 Iorga, Nicolae, historian 167 Iron Curtain 133 Istvańffi, Miklo´s 47 Italy ix, xvi, xvii, 4, 283, 288 see also Lombardy; Venice Izdenczy, Jo´zsef, ! b. 188 Jacquin, Nikolaus Joseph, ! b. 43 Jadot, Jean Nicolas 58 Jagiellon, house of 77 Jansˇa, Anton 136–7, 146 Jansenism 9, 38 and Bohemian influence 197 and the Enlightenment 52 and religious toleration 45–6 Japelj, Jurij, canon 46, 52, 144 Jarcke, Karl Ernst 275 Ja´szi, Oszka´r 301 Jellacˇic´, Josip, b., gen. xvi, 147, 254 Jena, university of 216 Jerome of Prague 46 Jesuits: in Bohemia 81 and criticism of 60 and dominance of 58 and opposition to 37–8 Jews 70–1, 91, 96, 224, 265, 286 and n91, 304 Joachimsthal (G.; now Cz. Jaćhymov) 76

327

Jordan, Johann Christoph von 41 Jordan, Peter 44 Joseph (Jo´zsef), ad., palatine of Hungary 178, 250 Joseph I, HRE, k. of Bohemia and Hungary xiv, 9, 13, 58 Joseph II, HRE, k. of Bohemia and Hungary xv and aims of 134 and attitude towards Hungary 33–4 and Bohemia 198 and border changes 125 and consequences of policies 135 and death of 34, 174 and education 69 and failure of Josephinism viii, 33–4, 197 and Hungarian opposition to 229 and initial admiration of 33 and Partitions of Poland 125 and religious toleration 65, 93 and theatre 63, 71 and Transylvanian Saxons 220 see also Josephinism Josephinism viii and aims of 134 and Bohemia/Moravia 92–3 and citizenship 137–8 and emergence of bourgeois nation 42 n24 and the Enlightenment 36, 53, 135 and Hungary: army 30–2 character in 34 conservative reaction to 150 failure under Joseph II 33–4 indirect impact on 18 opposition to 229 Ratio Educationis (education reform, 1777) 25 religious developments 22–5 state identity 26–30 Urbarium (peasant regulation, 1767) 20–2 and nationality 134, 140–6 Catholic Slavs 143–4 Catholic Slovaks 145 Croatia 144 Czechs 143, 144 Magyars 140–1 Protestants 141–2 Rumania 142–3 Transylvania 141–2 and nature of structural changes 18 and opposition to 134–5, 248 and origin of term 278 and Orthodox Christians 142 and outcome of 135 and patriotic reactions to 102 and Protestant reactions 140–2 and vernacular languages 136–7

328

Index

journals 136 and n6 Jozeffy, Pavol, Lutheran superintendent 158, 159 Kaiserfeld, Moritz von 261, 262 Kaiserstil 10–11 Kalnoky, Gustav, c. 194 Kant, Immanuel 69, 280 Kaplı´ˇr, Kaspar, gen. 90 Kara George (Karadjordje, or George Petrovic´), Serbian leader xv, 112, 233 Karadzˇic´, Vuk 165, 232, 250 Karl August, d. of Saxe-Weimar 174 Karl Eugen, d. of Wu¨rttemberg 63 Ka´rolyi, Alajos, c. 238 Ka´szonyi, Dańiel, sn. 181, 191 Ka´szonyi, Dańiel, jn. 191 Ka´szonyi, Theresa 182 Katona, Istvań 51 Kaunitz, Dominik Andreas, c. 89–90 Kaunitz, Wenzel Anton, ! pr., Austrian state chancellor xv, 39, 45, 54, 71, 95, 190, 297 and anti-Hungarian ethos 27 and influence of 197 and Josephinism 24 and policy of 94 and taxation 21, 188 Kazinczy, Ferenc 140–1, 176–7, 181, 194 Kecskeme´thy, Aure´l 282 Kelpius, Johann 216 Kemeńy, Zsigmond, b. 184, 191, 236, 237 Kempelen, Wolfgang (Farkas) 20, 22 Kerchelich, Adam, see Krcˇelic´ Keresztesi, Jo´zsef 141 Kertbeny, Karl/Ka´roly 240 Khautz, Constantin Franz von 47 Kindermann, Ferdinand, bp. 93 Kinsky, Franz Joseph, c., gen. 5, 31, 43, 55, 66–7, 95, 136 Kinsky, Franz Ulrich, c. 89 Kinsky family 87, 89 Klausenburg, see Kolozsva´r Kleyle, Karl von 276 Klimo´, Gyo¨rgy 53 Kohn, Hans 101 Ko¨lese´ri, Samuel 40 Kolla´r, Adam Franz 24, 27, 29, 48, 66, 110, 145, 301 Kolla´r, Jan 158, 164, 250 Koller, Ferenc Xaver, ! c.(?) 20, 29 Kollonich, Leopold, c., cardinal, and Einrichtungswerk 5 Kolowrat, Franz Anton, c. 94, 96, 199, 200, 201–2, 238 Kolowrat, Leopold, c. 95, 96, 189 Kolowrat, Philipp, c. 92

Kolowrat family 87 Kolozsva´r (H.; G. Klausenburg, now R. Cluj(-Napoca)) 8, 215 Ko¨niggra¨tz (Sadowa), battle of xvii, 207 Ko¨nigsberg, university of 69 Kopitar, (Jernej) Bartolomej 144, 250 Koppi, Ka´roly 52 Korabinsky, Johann M 139 Korodi, Lutz 241 Kossuth (Kosˇut), Friedrich Wilhelm 276 Kossuth, Lajos xvi, 110, 129, 177 n13, 186, 237, 251, 256, 301 and 1848–9 revolutionary period 173–4, 234, 252, 253, 254 and constitutionalism 231 and imprisonment of 176 and Lutheranism 153 and Serbian uprising 166 Kosztolańyi, Dezso˝ 239 Kovachich, Ma´rton Gyo¨rgy 43 Kova´ts, Istvań 249, 256 Kozˇeluh, Leopold 96 Kramerius, Vaćlav Matej 143 Krauss, Karl, b. 276 Krauss, Philipp, b. 256, 276 Krcˇelic´ (Kerchelich, Kercselics), Baltazar Adam, canon 27, 48, 66, 144 Kremsier (G.; now Cz. Krome˘ˇr´ızˇ) xvi, 255 Kresl von Qualtenberg, Franz Karl, ! b. 95 Krommer-Krama´ˇr, Franz 96 Krones, Franz von, historian 264–5 Kronstadt (G.; H. Brasso´, now R. Bras¸ov) 165, 213, 214, 221, 222 Ku¨beck, Karl Friedrich, ! b. 95, 189, 199, 272, 285 n89 Kurz, Anton 222 Kutschera, Johann 199 Kuttenberg (G.; now Cz. Kutna´ Hora) 76 Ladislav (Ladislaus) Posthumus, k. of Bohemia and Hungary 77 Lafnitz (G.; H. Lapincs), river (formerly between Austria and Hungary) 122 Lagarde, Paul 298 Lamberg, Maximilian, c. 55, 59 Lamberg, Franz (Ferenc), c., gen. 249 language: and fashion for French 59 and growth of idea of nationality 107 and imposition of German 135, 150, 229 and linguistic nationalism 34–5, 107, 109, 111, 113 and Magyar 150–1 as cause of internal friction 177 decay of 140 demands for 150–1

Index impact of 177 imposition of 153 introduction and use of 176–7 use of 26 and multilingualism 26 and Polish 104, 111 and vernacular languages 136–7, 143, 144–5 Latin, and use of 26, 67 Laube, Heinrich 277 Lazˇansky, Prokop, c. 96 learned societies (in eighteenth century) 40, 43–5, 50, 64 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 41, 64 Leiningen, Carl, pr. 234 Leipzig, university of 216 Leitha (G.; H. Lajta), river (between Austria and Hungary) 122, 129 Lelewel, Joachim 110, 129 Lemeńi, Ioan, bp. 167 Lenau (Niembsch von Strehlenau), Nikolaus 232 Leopold I, HRE and k. of Bohemia and Hungary xiv, 10, 86 and depictions of 11 Leopold II, HRE and k. of Bohemia and Hungary xv, 34, 162 Leszczyn´ski, Stanislas, (anti-)k. of Poland 59 Lev of Rozˇmita´l, Zdene˘k 80 Levitschnigg, Heinrich 249 Lewis, Ludwig 277 libraries 50–1 Lichnowsky, Felix, pr. 233–4 Liechtenstein, Karl, ! pr. 86, 89 Liechtenstein family 86, 89, 95, 118 n8 Ligne, Charles Joseph, pr. 68 linguistic nationalism 34–5, 107, 109, 111, 113 Linz 76 List, Friedrich 297 Liszt, Franz (Ferenc) 110, 129, 232, 252 literary history 138–9 Livonia, and German migration 211 Ljubljana (Slov.; G. Laibach) xvi, 46, 52 Lobkowitz, Wenzel Eusebius, pr. 89, 90 Lobkowitz, Zdene˘k Vojte˘ch, ! pr. 89 Lobkowitz family 87, 89 Lo¨her, Franz von 240 Lo¨hner, Ludwig 234, 254 Lombardy xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 4, 68 Lorraine 59, 128 Louis II, k. of Bohemia and Hungary 77 Louis XIV, k. of France 58 Lu¨beck 212 Luca, Ignaz de 50, 138–9 Ludendorff, Erich, gen. 299 Ludolf, Karl 240 Ludvigh, Johann (Jańos) 240

329

Ludvı´kovsky´, Jaroslav, literary historian 47 Lukaćs, Gyo¨rgy 241 Lu¨nig, Johann Christian 57, 69 Lusatia 75 and ceded to Saxony 88 and tensions with Bohemia 79–80 Lutherans/Lutheranism 39 in Hungary: German Lutherans 155 militancy of 153 Slovaks 157–8 and Transylvanian Saxons 155–6, 215 Maager, Karl 223 Maass, Ferdinand, historian 145 Macartney, Carlyle Aylmer, historian 101 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 137 Machault d’Arnouville, Jean Baptiste de 24 Mackinder, Halford, geographer 298–9 Magdeburg 212 Magenta, battle of xvii, 283 Magyar language: as cause of internal friction 177 and decay of 140 and demands for 150–1 and impact of 177 and imposition of 153 and introduction and use of 176–7 and use of 26 Magyars: and confessional divisions 151 and frontiers 127 and integration of Calvinists 152–3 and liberal Catholicism 151–2 and Lutheran militancy 153 and nationality 140 see also Hungary Mahler, Moriz 249 Maila´th, Gyo¨rgy, c. 180, 184, 187, 232 Maila´th, Jańos (Johann), c. 33, 180 Maila´th, Jo´zsef, c. 180 Maior, Petru 164 Maiorescu, Ioan 235 Manzador, Pius, bp. 52 March (G.; Cz. Morava), river and frontier 122 Marchfeld, battle on the (1282) 77 Marczali, Henrik, historian 33, 239, 241 Maria Theresa, qu. of Bohemia and Hungary viii, xiv, 4 and Bohemia 91, 92 political/administrative consolidation 92 recapture of 92 and death of 33 on establishing academy of sciences 50 and Hungary 32–3 governance of 19–20

330

Index

Maria Theresa, qu. of Bohemia and Hungary (cont.) indirect impact of reforms 18 policy towards 17–18, 196 Ratio Educationis (education reform 1777) 25 religious developments 22–5 Urbarium (peasant regulation 1767) 20–2 and state identity 27–30 Marsigli, Luigi, c., gen. 5, 123 and attitude towards Hungarians 12 Martinitz, Georg Adam, c. 90 Martinic, Jaroslav, c. 84 Martinic family 87 Ma´rton, Jo´zsef 249 Masaryk, Toma´ˇs Garrigue, president of Czechoslovakia 46, 302 Mason, Charles 123 Mathey, Jean-Baptiste 58 Maticas (Slav cultural organizations) 108, 146 and n Matice Ceska´ 201 Matica Slovenska´ 259 Matica Srpska 146n, 201 Matsche, Franz, art historian 10–11 Matthias Corvinus, k. of Hungary 48, 79, 80 Matthias, HRE, k. of Bohemia and Hungary 83–4 Maulpertsch, Franz Anton 71 Maximilian I, HRE 9, 77 Maximilian II, HRE and k. of Bohemia and Hungary 45, 82 Mecklenburg, and German migration 211 Mercy, Claudius Florimond, c. 6 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel, ! pr., Austrian state chancellor xvi, 238, 283 n80, 285 on Asia 129 as ‘Austrian’ statesman 297 and exclusion of 272 and Hungary 189, 190, 250–1 and liberalism 276 and policy of 96 Mevissen, Gustav 234 Meyer, Bernhard 236, 275, 280 Meyer, Cajetan 276 Meysenbug(-Rivalier), Otto, b. 288 Mickiewicz, Adam 110, 129 Micu-Klein, Inochentie, bp. 163–4 Micu-Klein, Samuil 164 Migazzi, Christoph Anton, c., abp., cardinal 26, 59 Miletic´, Svetozar 167 Milevsko (Cz.; G. Mu¨hlhausen) 51 n51 Miskolczy, Gyula, historian 199 Mitrofanov, Paul (Pavel), historian 135 Mitteleuropa 294, 297–9

Austro-German debate over 299–300 Nazi doctrine and strategy 300–1 see also Central Europe Mitteleuropaïscher Wirtschaftsverein 298 Mittrowsky, Anton Friedrich, c. 94, 96 Mocsa´ry, Lajos 239 Mohaćs, battle of (1526) 77–8 Molna´r, Jan 142 Moltke, Maximilian 222 Montalembert, Charles Forbes Rene´, de, c. 152 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de, b. 41, 296 Moravia 52, 75, 129 and Bohemia 88 and Bohemian Revolt (1618–20) 84 and Josephinism 92–3 and religious sectarians 45 and tensions with Bohemia 79–80 Mo¨ring, Carl 234 Mu¨ller, Johann Christoph 123 Mu¨ller-Guttenbrunn, Adam 241 Multz, Georg Ernst 42 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 66 Murgu, Eftimie 165 Muscovy, and emergence of 3 music 72 and Bohemian contribution to 96 Myl’nikov, Aleksandr S, historian 138 Na´dasdy, Ferenc, c, gen. 30 Na´dasdy, Miha´ly, c. 187 Nagymarton (H.; G. Mattersdorf, now Mattersburg) 194 Nagyszombat (H.; G. Tyrnau, now Sl. Trnava) 38 Nagyva´rad (H.; G. Grosswardein, now R. Oradea) 141 Namier, (Sir) Lewis, historian 266–7, 291, 292 n116 Nancy (Lorraine), and role as cultural mediator 59 Naples xiv, 4 Napoleon I, e. of the French xv, xvi, 109 Napoleon III, e. of the French 283 nationality/nationalism: and Counter-Reformation 104 and Croatia 144 and Czechs 143, 144 and East-Central Europe: debates in 112–13 defining single identity 109–10 economic explanation of 103 ethnic ressentiment 108 growth of idea of nationality 104–8 historical justifications 113 impact of intellectual climate 103

Index impact of settlement patterns 113 nature of experience of 112 pan-Slavism 110–11 political explanation of 102 process of receptivity 103 rivalry of national movements 111–12 role of Westernized intellectuals 103–4, 108–10, 113 and the Enlightenment 135, 138–9, 145–6 and frontiers 114–15, 120–1 and German nationalist movements 240–1 and historiography of 101–2 and Josephinism 134, 140–6 and linguistic nationalism 34–5, 107, 109, 111, 113 vernacular languages 136–7, 143, 144–5 and Magyars 140–1 and neo-absolutism 279–82 and patriotism, development of 61–3 and Protestants 141–2 and religion 104–5 and Romanticism 107–8 and Rumanians 142–3, 164–5 and Saxons of Transylvania 215, 221–2, 224–5, 227, 240 and Serbians 164–5 and Slavs 143–4 and Slovaks 145, 157, 159 and Transylvanian Saxons 141–2 and vernacular languages 136–7, 143, 144–5 natural law 60 Naumann, Friedrich 294, 295, 299, 300, 301, 302 Nazism: and German diasporas 227 and Mitteleuropa 300 Neny, Cornelius 22, 59 neo-absolutism (of 1850s Austria) 97–8, 203–5 and achievements of 292 and army 270–1 and Austrian-Papal Concordat 273, 276 and Catholic church 273–5 and centralized administration 271 and constitutional changes 285–7 and conventional account of 267–8 and Crimean War 284 and economic achievements 269 and economic conditions 283 and education 274 and failure of 290–2 and features of 268–9 and German identity 277–9 language 278 and the German question 287–90 and Hungary 286–7 and influence of liberalism 276–7 and innovative nature of 268–9

331

and nationality question 279–82 and position of nobility 271–2 and problems with Catholic programme 275–6 and Prussia 283–4 and restructuring of 285 and unified Reich 283–4 Neo-Acquistica (lands in Hungary) 5, 13, 124 Neruda, Jan 281 n65 Netherlands, Southern (Belgium) xiv, xv, 4 Neugeboren, Daniel Georg, bp. 219 Neustadt, Adolf 249 Newman, Francis William 268 Newman, John Henry, cardinal 268 Nicaragua 294 Niczky, Kristo´f, ! c. 20, 28 nobles, see aristocracy Nostitz(-Rieneck), Friedrich Moritz, c., gen. 93, 198 Nostitz(-Rieneck), Franz Anton, c. 64, 68, 93 Nostitz family 87 ´ jvide´k, G. Neusatz) 165 Novi Sad (S.; H. U Nuremberg 212, 214 Oberleutensdorf (G.; now Cz. Hornı´ Litvıńov) 42 Obradovic´, Dositej 112, 142, 165, 232 October Diploma xvii, 205, 206, 258–9 Oder-Neisse line 131, 132 Oettl, Joseph 271 Olomouc (Cz.; G. Olmu¨tz) xvi, xvii, 44 Oncken, Hermann, historian 300 Orczy, Lo˝rinc, b. 31 Oriental Trading Company (Ostindische Handelskompagnie, 1719–27) 42 Orsini, Felice 283 Orthodox Christians 7, 23 and Counter-Reformation 8 in Hungary 160–1 Rumanians 163–4 Ruthenes 160–1 Serbians 161–3 and Josephinism 142 ¨ sterreichischer Lloyd 277 O Otakar II, k. of Bohemia 77 Ottoman Empire, and Turks 7, 14, 73, 90, 98, 112, 215, 220, 298 and wars against xiv, xv, 3, 11, 12, 56, 77, 81, 83 and lands recovered from 5, 18, 27, 50, 128, 196, 218 and anti-Turkish rhetoric 9, 11, 57, 294 and settlements with 114, 123–4 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 116 Pace, Bernardino de, c. 48 Padańyi Bı´ro´, Ma´rton, bp. 23 n13

332

Index

Palacky´, Frantisˇek viii, 97–8, 110, 113, 128, 157–8, 202, 207, 231, 260, 280–1 Pa´lffy, Alois, c. 187 Pa´lffy, Jańos, c., palatine of Hungary 30 Pa´lffy, Ka´roly, c., chancellor of Hungary 179 Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband ) 225, 240–1, 299 Pannonhalma (H.; G. Martinsberg) 50 Pannonius, Janus 47 pan-Slavism 110–11, 250 Partsch, Joseph, geographer 298–9, 302 Passarowitz (G.; now S. Pozˇarevac), peace of xiv, 6 Pa´szthory, Sańdor 180, 183, 184 patriotism, and development of 61–4, 106 see also nationality/nationalism Pa´zmańdy, Deńes 233, 234 peasants, and Urbarium (peasant regulation 1767) 20–2 Peithner, Johann Thaddaüs 43 Pelcl (Pelzl), Frantisˇek Martin 49, 67, 135, 138, 139, 143, 144 Pennsylvania 216, 217 Pergen, Johann Anton, c. 69 Pest xvi, 142, 146 n. 158, 165, 181, 201, 235, 264 see also Budapest Peter I, the Great, e. of Russia 10, 218 Peto˝fi, Sańdor 110, 153 Petrasch, Joseph, b. 31, 44 Pez, Bernhard 51 Phillips, George 275 Piarist order 51, 60 and education 38 Piast (Polish dynasty) 77 Pichler, Caroline 69 Pietist movement 220 Pillersdorf, Franz, b. 253, 254 Piłsudski, Jo´zef, gen., head of Polish state 146 Pipitz, Joseph von 276 Piter, Bonaventura, abbot 51 Piuariu-Molna´r, Ioan 137 Pius VI, pope 73 Poda, Nikolaus 43 Podmaniczky, Jo´zsef, b. 66, 141 Pohlin, Marko 51 Poland viii, ix, xiv, 29, 59, 63, 146, 198 and Bohemia 77, 80 and borders 131 and n40, 132–3 and Catholicism 105 and Enlightenment 40, 105 and Germans 128–9, 211–12, 218 and Habsburg claims 66 and Hungary 27, 77, 256 and Jesuits 58 and Mitteleuropa 300–3

and nationalism 107–8, 110–12, 129 and ‘organic work’ 185 and Partitions of xv, 27, 102, 106, 114, 125, 129, 196 and Renaissance 295 and Uniates 8 and Zips towns 27, 117, 223 Pole, Reginald, cardinal 46 Poles in emigration 108, 268 n6, 302 Pomerania 128 and German migration 211 popular culture 69–70 popular discontent 4 and Urbarium (peasant regulation 1767) 21 popular opinion 263–4 Potter, Isaac 42 Pragmatic Sanction xiv, 13 acknowledged by Hungarian estates 4 and Bohemia 91 in nineteenth century 174, 261 Prague xvi, 75 Pray, Gyo¨rgy 51 Prazˇa´k, Albert, literary historian 143 n31 Premonstratensian order 51 Prˇemyslid (Bohemian dynasty) 76, 77 Pressburg (G.; H. Pozsony; Sl. Presˇporok, now Bratislava) xv, xvi, 29, 52, 145, 198 Private Society (Privatgesellschaft, in eighteenth-century Bohemia) 40, 45, 47, 143 and n32 Procha´zka, Franz Faustin 46, 47, 49, 52, 144 professions, and foreign influences within 42 Prokesch von Osten, Anton, ! c. 284 Prońay, Ga´bor, b. 141 Protestants 7 and Bohemian Revolt (1618–20) 83–5 and foreign links of 39 in Hungary 65–6, 140–1, 149 integration of Calvinists 152–3 Lutheran militancy 153 and Josephinism 140–2 and religious toleration 45–7, 65–6 and restrictions on 8, 23 and survival of 39 and Toleration Patent 33, 140 see also Calvinism; Lutherans/Lutheranism Prussia xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 3, 10, 128 and the Enlightenment 60 reaction against 63 and German migration 211 and Prussian-Austrian frontier 124 see also Germany/Germans Pulszky, Ferenc 202, 230, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255 Puritans (in Hungary) 137 Pyrker, Johann Ladislas, abp. 155, 232, 252

Index Radetzky, Josef Wenzel, ! c., gen. xvi, 97, 199, 253, 270 Radowitz, Joseph Maria von, gen. 234 Rajacˇic´, Josif, metropolitan 147–8, 166, 167 Ra´koćzi, Ferenc II, pr. 6, 13, 38, 194 and exclusion of 11 and rebellion of xiv, 4, 196 Ra´kosi, Jeno˝ 223, 240 Ranke, Leopold von, historian 232–3, 296 Ransano, Pietro 47 Ratio Educationis (education reform programme 1777) 25, 136 Ratzel, Friedrich, geographer 299 Rautenstrauch, (Franz) Stephan, abbot 42, 45, 51, 95, 135 rebellion: and Ra´koćzi rebellion 4, 196 by peasants 21, 163 Rechberg, Johann Bernhard, c. 285, 288 Reclus, Eliseé, geographer 298 Rećsey, Adam, b., gen. 249 Redemptorist order 273 Redlich, Josef, historian 245 Reformation: and idea of nationality 104 and Transylvanian Saxons 215 Reichsrat (Imperial Council) xvii, 205–6, 236, 259, 260, 285 and n89, 286–9 Reichsstil 10 religion: and Counter-Counter-Reformation 44, 66 and Counter-Reformation 7–9, 53–4 and education 274 and education reform 25 and idea of nationality 104–5 and intellectual prominence of clergy 50–3 and Joseph II’s reforms 33 and Maria Theresa’s reforms 22–5 and modern wars of 148 and religious toleration 44–7, 65–6, 93, 140 see also Orthodox Christians; Protestants; Roman Catholicism; Uniate churches Renaissance: and idea of nationality 104 and recovery of 138 Reviczky, Ka´roly, ! c. 29, 67, Reviczky, A´da´m, c., chancellor of Hungary 183, 187 revolutions of 1848–9 ix, xvi, 97, 102, 108, 110, 113, 147–8, 165–9, 173, 190–1, 203, 222, 233–5, 252–6 Riedel, Andreas, ! b. 248 n8 Rieger, Frantisˇek Ladislav 255, 259 Riegger, Joseph Anton von 49, 139, 143 Riegger, Paul Joseph von 49 Riga 63 Roesler, Robert 241

333

Rogge, Walter 223 n38, 264, 277 Rohr, Julius Bernhard 57 n3 Roman Catholicism viii, 119 and Austrian-Papal Concordat 273, 276 and Counter-Reformation 7–9 and Croatia 153–4 and Hungary: German Catholics 154–5 rise of liberal Catholicism 151–2 Slovaks 156–7 and Maria Theresa’s reforms 22–3 and origins of Enlightenment 37–9 and Poland 105 and post-revolutionary Austria 273–6 Romanticism 229 and growth of idea of nationality 107–8 and historical frontiers 126 Roth, Stephan Ludwig 156, 167, 222, 235 Rotteck, Karl von 232 and n19 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 107 Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste 41 Royko, Kaspar 46 Rudnay, Alexander, abp. 156–7 Rudolf I, HRE 77 Rudolf II, HRE, and k. of Bohemia and Hungary 48, 82–3 Rumania/Rumanians xvii, 139 n17, 161, 163–4 and Habsburg expansion into 3–4 and nationality 142–3, 164, 165 and response to 1848 revolution 166, 167 and Supplex Libellus Valachorum 164 Rumburg (G.; now Cz. Rumburk) 42 Russia xv, xvi and German immigrants 218, 226 Ruthenes 160–1 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 292 Sachs von Harteneck, Johann 216 n13 Sˇafa´rik (Sˇafarˇ´ık), Pavel Jozef 110, 301 S¸aguna, Andreiu, abp. 167, 168 St John Nepomuk 90 St Stephen, order of 30 St Wenceslas 90 Salm, Karl Theodor Otto, pr. 11 Sancta Clara, Abraham a 7 Sanfedisti 148 Saphir, Moritz Gottlieb 249 Sa´rospatak 194 Saxons of Transylvania 155–6, 213, 229, 240 and conflict with Transylvanian nobles 215–16 and evolution of Transylvanian state 215 and impact of First World War 226–7 and influence in Austria 257 n39 and internal divisions 222

334

Index

Saxons of Transylvania (cont.) and links with Germany 214, 216, 219, 222, 224–5 Lutheran universities 216, 220 and Lutheranism 155–6, 215 as medieval ‘nation’ 213 and national identity 215, 221–2 German basis of 224–5, 227, 240 and Nazi Germany 227 and privileges of 213 loss of 223, 240 and relationship with Austria 219–20, 221, 223 and settlement of 213 and status of 219 and Swabians 223–4 Saxony 63 and German migration 211 Scha¨ffle, Albert 298 Scha¨ssburg (G.; H. Segesva´r, now R. Sighis¸oara) 213 Schedius, Ludwig 230 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 107 Schemnitz (G.; H. Selmecbańya, now Sl. Banska´ Sˇtiavnica) 43 Scheyb, Franz Christoph von 41, 47 Schier, Xystus 51 Schierendorff, Christian Julius Schierl von 247 Schiller, Friedrich 63 Schilling, Ernst 233 Schleswig-Holstein affair (1864–5) 290 Schlick family 87 Schlo¨zer, August Ludwig 69, 141, 155, 221, 222, 229, 231, 296 Schmalkaldic War (1546–7) 81 Schmeizel, Martin 220 Schmerling, Anton von, Austrian premier xvii, 261, 263, 276, 286, 287, 288, 289 Scho¨nholz, Friedrich Anton von 251 and n22 Schroër, Tobias Gottfried 224 Schulte, Johann Friedrich 275 n38 Schuselka, Franz 250, 254 Schwarzenberg, Felix, pr., Austrian premier xvi, 97, 204, 236, 256, 267, 268, 271–2, 283–4 Schwarzenberg, Friedrich, pr., abp., cardinal 273 Schwarzenberg, Friedrich, pr., gen. 272 Schwendi, Lazarus, b., gen. 45 Scopoli, Giovanni Antonio 43 Scott, Sir Walter 107 Seberini, Jań, Lutheran superintendent 158, 159 secret police 188 Sedan, battle of (1870) 238 Sedlmayr, Hans, art historian 10

Sedlnitzky, Josef, c. 96, 189, 199 Seibt, Karl Heinrich 64, 137 n9 self-determination, and artificial frontiers 131, 132 Serbia/Serbians xiv, xv, xvii, 139 n17, 161–3 and Habsburg expansion into 3 and Hungarian civil war (1848–9) 147–8 and Josephinism 142 and nationality 164–5 and opposition to Magyars 162 and privileges of 161–2 and response to 1848 revolution 166–7 Seton-Watson, Hugh, historian 101 Seton-Watson, Robert William, publicist and historian 101, 302 settlement patterns, and diasporas 210 Seven Years War (1756–63) 92 Shakespeare, William 107 Sicily xiv, 4 Sickel, Theodor von, historian 279 Sigismund, HRE and k. of Hungary and (later) Bohemia 77, 214 Silesia xiv, xv, 75, 128 and Bohemia 88 and Bohemian Revolt (1618–20) 84 and German migration 211, 212 and loss of 60, 92, 196 and Prussian-Austrian frontier 124 and tensions with Bohemia 79–80 Silvester Patents xvii, 267, 268, 270, 279 S¸incai, Gheorghe 164, 165 Skalica (Sl.; H. Szakolcza) 195 Sˇkrlec (Skerlecz), Nikola 135, 144 Slav Congress (1848) xvi, 253 Slavata, Vile´m, c. 84 Slavata family 87 Slavı´kovice (Cz.; G. Slawikowitz) 198 Slavs: and frontiers 128 and neo-absolutism 280–1 and October Diploma 259 Slovaks: in Hungary Catholics 156–7 compared with Welsh 159–60 Lutheran minority 157–8 nationality 157, 159 petition against Magyars 158–9 and pan-Slavism 110 Slovenske´ Ucˇene´ Tovarisˇstvo (literary association) 157 Smetana, Augustin 276 n40 Smetana, Bedrˇich 110 Societas Incognitorum Litteratorum (1745–52) 44 Solferino, battle of (1859) xvii, 236, 283

Index Somogyi, Jańos 181, 188 Somssich, Pa´l 281 Sonnenfels, Joseph von 27, 31, 43, 62, 64, 67, 68, 71, 96, 138 Speed, John 119 Spengler, Oswald 295 Sporck, Franz Anton, c. 41, 45–6 Springer, Anton, historian 264 Srbik, Heinrich von, historian 287, 301 Sremski Karlovci (S.; G. Carlowitz or Karlowitz, H. Karloća) 148, 166 State Council (Staatsrat) xv, 21–2, 24, 27–8, 181, 187–8, 197 state identity: and the army 30–2 and creation of 26–30 statistics 139 Stein, Lorenz von 277, 290 Steinacker, Edmund 224, 225, 241 Steinbach von Kranichsfeld, Otto, abbot 45, 51 Stephen (Istvań), ad., palatine of Hungary 176, 190 Stephen I, St., k. of Hungary 212 Stepling, Joseph 38, 47 Sternberg family 87 Stifter, Adalbert 264, 280, 284 n84 Sto¨ger, Ferdinand 45 Strahov 71 Strakosˇ, Jan, historian 143 n31 Strańsky´, Pavel 49 Stratimirovic´, Djordje, gen., Serbian 1848 leader 166 Stratimirovic´, Stevan, metropolitan 162 Strossmayer, Josip Juraj, bp. 129 Sˇtu´r, L’udevit 158–9, 166 Styria 129 and frontier with Hungary 118–19 Sudeten Germans 204 superstition, and campaign against 70 Swabia xv, 117 Swabians (in Hungary) 218, 223–4, 229, 230, 240, 252 Swieten, Gerard van, ! b. 29, 60, 70 n43 Swieten, Gottfried van, b. 67–8 Szabo´, Ervin 301 Szalay, La´szlo´ 233, 234 Szatma´r (H.; now R. Satu Mare), peace of xiv, 4, 6, 40 Szećheńyi, Ferenc, c. 185 Szećheńyi, Imre, c. 238 Szećhenyi, Istvań, c. xvi, 110, 129, 135, 202, 252, 258, 283 on Bohemia 199–200 and career of 151–2, 185–6 and criticism by 230, 236, 257, 285 and failure of 186–7

335

and renewal programme 175–6 and spurned by Metternich 189 Szećsen, Antal, c. 191, 258, 263 Szećsen, Miklo´s, c. 192 Szećsen, Sańdor 180 Szemere, Bertalan 230, 254 Szo˝gyeńy(-Marich), La´szlo´, ! b., vice-chancellor of Hungary 181, 191 Szo˝gyeńy(-Marich), La´szlo´, ! c., diplomat 192, 238–9 Szo˝gyeńy, Zsigmond 180–1 Szo˝gyeńy family 181 tariffs: and abolition of internal 268 and frontiers 117, 120 Tartarotti, Girolamo 70 Taube, Friedrich Wilhelm von 41 Taulow von Rosenthal, Theodor Anton 41, 44 taxation 6 and Bohemia 87–8, 90 Taylor, A J P, historian 245 n1 Teleki, La´szlo´, c. 235, 301 Teleki, Sa´muel, c. 33, 40, 47, 66, 141 Teleki, Sańdor, c. 40 Teleki, Jo´zsef, c. 141 Temesva´r (H.; now R. Timis¸oara) Serb congress at (1790) 142, 162 Tepl (G.; now Cz. Tepla´) 50 n50 Tesańek, Jan 38 Teschen (G.; now Cz. Te˘ˇs´ın and P. Cieszyn) 124 n25, 129 Teutonic order 211, 213 Teutsch, Friedrich, bp. 219, 224 Teutsch, Georg Daniel, bp. 222–3, 224 theatre 63, 68, 71, 235 Thirty Years War (1618–48) 9, 87 Thun, Friedrich, c. 284 Thun, Joseph, c. 201, 202 Thun, Leo, c. 202, 204, 250, 274, 278, 279, 285 Thuringia 130 T¸ ichindeal, Dimitrie 165 Tisza, Istvań, ! c., Hungarian premier 192, 241 Tisza, Ka´lmań, Hungarian premier 192, 237, 239 Tisza, Lajos 192 and n63 Tkalac, Imbro Ignjatijevic´ 124 Tocqueville, Alexis de, historian 65 Toleration, patents of (1781–2) xv, 33, 44, 65, 140 toleration, religious 45–7, 65–6 and Bohemia 93 Transleithania (Hungary) 248, 255 see also Cisleithania

336

Index

Transylvania xiv, 12 and border changes 125 and Counter-Reformation 8 and diet of 7 and evolution of separate state 215 and French cultural influence 59 and government of 13 and Habsburg Monarchy divide and rule policy 28 expansion into Transylvania 3 religious policy 151 status in 219 and Hungarian civil war (1848–9) 148 and internal borders 118 and Ra´koćzi rebellion 4 and religion, Saxon Lutherans 155–6 and taxation 6 see also Saxons of Transylvania Transylvanian School (of Rumanian Uniate intellectuals) 163–4 Treitschke, Heinrich von, historian 224, 284 n82 Trencˇ´ın (Sl.; H. Trencseń) 195 Trent, council of (1545–63) 45 Trianon, treaty of (1920) 131 Trieste 42, 277 Turks, see Ottoman Empire Ungar, Raphael Carl 52, 139 Ungarla¨ndische Deutsche Volkspartei 225, 241 Unger, Joseph 261 Uniate churches 8, 23, 163–4 and Hungary 149–50 and Josephinism 142 United States, and German immigrants 216–18, 225–6 universities 229 and Enlightenment 60 and Joseph II on role of 69 and neoclassical movement 67 and opposition to Jesuits 37–8 and Transylvanian Saxons 216, 220 Urbarium (peasant regulation 1767) xv, 20–2 ¨ rmeńyi, Jo´zsef 25, 180, 187 U Ustasˇa (Croatian movement) 169 n68 Utraquists 80, 81 see also Hus, Hussites Valence 117 vampires 70 Vanhal, Johann Baptist 96 Vay, Istvań 141 Ve´degylet movement (1840s) 250, 251 Vendeéns 148 Venice and Venetia xv, xvi, xvii, 27, 155, 187, 252 Verri, Pietro, c. 68

Versailles, treaty of (1919) 132 Verseghy, Ferenc 52 Vico, Giambattista 12 Vienna xvi, 4, 69, 214 and 1848–9 revolutionary period 255 and development of 76 and relief of xiv, 3 Vienna, congress of (1814–15) xvi, 126 Vienna, university of 37–8 Vienna City Bank 13 Vladislav II, k. of Bohemia and Hungary 77 Voigt, Mikula´ˇs Adaukt 42, 47, 51, 139 Vojvodina (region in Hungary) 168 see also Banat of Temesva´r Vorˇ´ıˇsek, Jan Vaćlav 96 Vranitzky, Pavel 96 Vrhovac, Makso (Maximilian), bp. 144, 154 Wagner von Wagenfels, Hans Jacob 11, 58, 61 Waldstein (Wallenstein), Albrecht, d. of Friedland, gen. 87, 89 Waldstein, Karl Ernst, c. 90 Waldstein, Karl Ferdinand, c. 90 Waldstein family 89 Wallaszky, Pa´l 139 Walterskirchen, Georg Wilhelm, b. 251 Wekerle, Sańdor, Hungarian premier 240 Welsh, and compared with Slovaks 159–60 Wenceslas, HRE and k. of Bohemia 76–7, 78 Wesseleńyi, Miklo´s, b. 201, 203, 230–1, 254 Wessenberg, Johann Philipp, b. 234, 238, 254, 256 Weszpre´mi, Istvań 40, 139 White Mountain, battle of xiv, 4, 85, 195 Wiegand, Johann 136 n6 Wiener Neustadt 76, 95, 136 Wildner von Maithstein, Ignaz 246 and n3, 251 William I, e. of Germany 240, 285 n87 William II, e. of Germany 239 Wilson, Woodrow, president of USA 302 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 67 Windisch, Karl Gottlieb von 230 Windischgra¨tz, Alfred, ! pr., gen. xvi, 97, 199, 253, 270, 272 Winter, Eduard, historian 42, 145 Wirkner, Ludwig 179, 189 Wirsing, Giselher 300 witchcraft 70 Wittenberg, university of 216 Wolff, Larry, historian 296 Wrbna, Rudolf, c. 96 Wu¨rttemberg 63, 70 Wurzbach, Constant von 265, 271, 274–5, 279 Wu¨rzburg, university of 278

Index Zagreb (Cr.; G. Agram, H. Za´gra´b) 12, 144, 168 Zay, Ka´roly, c. 153, 158 Zedler, Johann Heinrich 118 Z˘erotıń, Karel, b. 45, 48, 49 Zıćhy, Ferdinand, c., gen. 187 Zıćhy, Ka´roly (Karl), sn., c., president of State Council 179, 187, 198, 199 Zıćhy, Ka´roly (Karl), jn., c., president of Chamber 179, 185

337

Zıćhy family 189 Ziegelbauer, Magnoald 51 Zinzendorf, Karl, c. 45, 59, 135 Zips (G.; H. Szepesse´g, now Sl. Spisˇ), Hungarian region 27, 117, 130 and n38, 223, 229 and Saxons in 155 Zmeskall, Nikolaus (Miklo´s) 182 Zois, Antonio, b. 144 n35 Zois, Sigmund (Z˘iga), b. 144 Zu¨rner, Adam Friedrich 119

Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c.1683-1867

Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c.1683-1867

Soviet Air Force in Hungary and Austria

Europe Central

Europe Central

Austria-Hungary & the Successor States

Europe Central

Europe Central

Central Europe

Central Europe and the European Union: The Meaning of Europe

Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holocaust

Lonely Planet Central Europe

Tales From Central Europe

Liberal Professions and Illiberal Politics: Hungary from the Habsburgs to the Holocaust

Hungary and the Fall of Eastern Europe 1000-1568

Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends

Eastern and Central Europe (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe

Palaeozoic amalgamation of Central Europe

Hungary

Strategic Alliances in Eastern and Central Europe

Globalization: perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe

Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends

Hungary and the Fall of Eastern Europe, 1000-1568

Culture and Customs of Hungary (Culture and Customs of Europe)

Austria

The Politics of Ethnicity in Central Europe

The Central Middle Ages Europe 950–1320

The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe

Hungary

Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths (Studies in Central and Eastern Europe)

Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c.1683-1867